No more, please!

Happy Veteran's Day!
{{THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH FOR EVERYTHING YOU HAVE DONE/ARE DOING/WILL DO FOR OUR COUNTRY!!}}

My kiddos

Took these photos of my two on November 3rd.
This would be them if they were the stars of their own coloring book ;-)



^asleep in his car seat



^throwing a fit on the couch

Introducing our baby girl!!

•Little Miss Blondie was born Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 1:52 p.m.
•She weighed in at 8 pounds and 10 ounces (beating her brother's weight by seven ounces) and was 21 inches long.
•She has blonde hair and blue eyes.
•Perfectly healthy!

We were released from the hospital early Wednesday afternoon, and kept our cutie pie little boy with us the entire time we were in there (except for when she was actually being born; he waited in the waiting room with our family). She's a great baby. Very quiet, just like her big brother was when he was her size. He's adjusting great and is very protective of her. Daddy is loving having two little kiddos around. I'm enjoying life to the fullest and so thankful for all that God has blessed me with. Life is amazing, to put it mildly :-)




My guys, walking into the hospital Monday morning



39 weeks 4 days



Tiny little feet



Beautiful rose my hubby bought me



My hubby surprised me and came in with a new mini van he bought! It's a 2001 Oldsmobile Silhouette & I LOVE IT!! So many great features and it's in awesome shape. We have plenty of room now *yay!!*

Arrgh...

My blog is temporarily under the weather as I change things around.

Please excuse the mess until I get everything added back.

Thanks!

From SOOC to Fully Edited

I'm really embarrassed to show this photo SOOC!! They're usually not this blah and ugly. I snapped it out the car window today (well, technically yesterday... I just havent been to bed and it's a new day) as we were driving by, and didnt have the time to adjust the settings in manual mode. Had I tried, I would have missed the opportunity to even get the photo at all. So, ya take what you can get.... riiiiiight?!!

I did not like this photo at all when I uploaded them onto my computer tonight. It just looked so... well, like I said before, blah and ugly! I could have scrapped the photo and not thought twice about it. But, I didnt! I thought it had some potential --just needed a little lovin' to make it look alright!


^Here is the SOOC;
only resized to 600px on the long side to share here.



^Here it is having only been edited in ACR;
& resized to 600px on the long side to share on here.



^Here is the photo with my normal editing done to it.
Some of the steps:
•Cropped;
resized to 600px on the long side.
•Cloned out the house with the red roof.
•Original layer duplicated;
soft light on top layer,
lower opacity,
merge.
•Sponged the whole photo on saturate to bring out the colors.
•Messed with the hue/sat to pop the colors a little bit more.
•Sky was too light for my liking, so I burned it.
•Used the sponge/burn/dodge tools throughout photo;
helped to add extra highlights and shadows where I wanted.
•Defogged and sharpened the image.



^Here is the final editing I did to the image.
Sometimes, I like to do extra editing on images to just spruce them up a bit more. This was one of those photos that I thought would benefit from doing so.
Some of my steps (using the last image):
•I blurred the sky to give it a more soft appearance.
•I duplicated the image twice;
high pass sharpen, set to overlay, lowered opacity,
duplicated, set to linear light, lowered opacity,
merged.
•Duplicated layer;
added gaussian blur,
set to overlay,
duplicated layer,
set to soft light,
lowered opacity,
merged.
•Sharpened.

Finally... Fall Colors!

A few from today; shot out the window of the car with my new Sigma 28-70mm f/2.8-4 lens :-)


















^my back yard