Last weekend, we went to Washington DC for my cousin’s wedding. I took plenty of photos, so this is just the “Capitol Hill” portion of them. Boy, did Evan have fun running around on that lawn. I hope he doesn’t want to become a Congressman.

And here is a then and now (the first photo is from 2009 at Obama’s inauguration):

 

We had a lovely visit from Ben’s parents this week. I shot these on Sunday morning when we took the trolly up to Tarpon Springs and wandered the sponge docks a bit.

 

On Sunday, I desperately wanted to go to the beach. Evan’s mid-day nap makes it a little difficult, but we planned to put him down a little early and hopefully head to the beach around 3pm. At 3pm, Evan was still sleeping and the wind was blowing at a steady 26 miles per hour.  So we went to plan B.

After dinner, we hopped in the car, fought our way through the spring breakers, and took a little walk on Clearwater Beach.

Evan didn’t remember the beach. He kept saying “wow” and then made up a fun game of throwing himself on the sand. He likes to take off so we used the monkey backpack (“packpack!”) to keep him away from the water and near us. I never thought I would be the parent who put her kid on a leash.

We didn’t stay for the actual sunset (it’s a little too close to E’s bedtime and we knew we’d have to fight the tourists on the way off the beach, too), but we had fun walking around on such a lovely evening.

On the photography side of things, I used my 50 1.8, but kept the f-stop a little higher than I generally like because of all the light. I find that it sometimes has a hard time autofocusing if subjects are too far or too close. I actually had to set it to infinity focus for the two setting sun shots. I also learned how to use the clone button in photoshop and deleted a few birds and the tag off of Evan’s backpack. I think you can tell but not too bad. I am finally using photoshop in its verb form.

 So this post was full of words. Happy Wordless Wednesday, regardless.

My excitement this week is that I tried shooting in raw. And I figured out how actions work in photoshop. The result of my experiments:

Far from perfect, I am sure. But it’s fun to play around.

On Sunday, we went down to Largo Central Park to ride the train (once a month, a volunteer group puts on these awesome train rides for kids). But the line was long, and E doesn’t really know what’s going on yet, so we just ran around the park for awhile instead playing and snapping photos.

First, my absolute favorite of the day:

You don’t normally think of “pretty” when you think of Largo, FL (or at least I don’t). But Largo Central Park is actually quite lovely (and has a fantastic playground). It’s worth the few extra miles.

And they have a great field to run around with a soccer ball in.

I know this next one is not the model of perfect photography (the sky is overexposed for one thing) but it makes my heart happy.

More soccer:

And another favorite (even though I think the focus ended up on the soccer ball and E’s face is a bit out of focus – that 1.8 lens takes some practice):

I told you I was obsessed.

Evan is obsessed with the moon. Which has apparently left me obsessed with the moon. My first attempts at photographing it. Any tips?