This was one of my favorite weeks of the entire year. My birthday, a concert in Olympia at Capitol High School where my grandson plays the clarinet, an almost full day with my family, making pizza with my granddaughter and playing games with the whole bunch. I bet you know which one is my favorite this week...it has to be my daughter, grandkids and Keeley from Saturday. It's a total winner.
Continuing our Christmas theme, yesterday we featured a Christmas dog, and today we have a Christmas moose with his little boy. I enjoy taking bokeh shots with the lights shimmering in the background. This guy has lights on him, so it looks even better. Using a 50mm f1.4 lens with a very shallow depth of field really helps.
The young man on the left is my grandson Mason. Tonight, we attended his high school orchestra’s Christmas concert. It was very nice, and it’s great that he is finally in high school, so we no longer have to go to concerts in the gymnasium and sit on hard bleachers. His school has a beautiful concert hall venue. Sadly, it was POURING tonight, and I didn’t want to take my Nikon out in the rain, so I had to shoot this with my phone. I still am okay with it, but it would have been so much better with a camera and a longer lens.
Today was wrapping day. We have finished all our Christmas shopping, and I have to say I have never been so excited about what we got for everybody on our list. I can’t wait to see if they all like it as much as we enjoyed getting it for them. So today, I spent wrapping. This is the rest of today.
For the last three weeks, I have stopped at the Bellevue branch of the King County Library to take a photo of their wall of license plates. Each week, I have found a better photo, so today I went back and got another one. (I now have three weeks of license plates.) They are not real plates but are made from words. Most of them are black and white, so I converted the entire photo to grayscale. I like it better that way.
Today was a REALLY special day for me. My family (kids and grandkids) came to celebrate my birthday. They asked what I wanted to do, and I said I wanted them to come to our house so I could make pizza for them. It has been so long since I have been able to cook a real meal for them, so that’s what I wanted to do. They drove up, and we played games. I got to assemble pizzas with my granddaughter, and I got to spend the entire day with my son, my daughter, my grandkids, my son-in-law, Kathleen and Keeley. It was glorious. My granddaughter, my daughter and my grandson were on the couch with Keeley, and this was the most fun photo I took all day.
Took Keeley on a 3-mile walk today, and we went to Duck Lake. It’s about 1.5 miles from our house. I have taken photos of this lake before, but never with this much water. Usually, it’s a big swamp or bog, but with all our recent rains, it’s a lake again.
As you have probably heard, we here in the Pacific Northwest have had a lot of rain this week and last night’s wind. I wanted to walk one of our Trilogy trails today to see if there was any damage. There were a few trees down, but when I went to take a shot of Cari’s Bog, the biggest impact of the storm was that the bog was full of water. The most I have seen in the three years we have lived here.
I never knew what I was doing until I was done. – Man Ray
