Rain and Showers

I just got back from spending four fantastic days in Seattle. I think this is a record for shortest time in between visits! Our very good friends Emily and Nathan (Check out Emily's stamping over at stamped and delivered) are having a baby so we decided to throw them a shower. Together with my good friend Annie, we planned a DIY shower full of crafty fun.

I flew in on Thursday and spent the afternoon shopping with Emily. Few things are better than spending the afternoon at the mall with a good friend! Living far away my trips are often filled with very focused bouts of visiting time, parties, and activities. The luxury of an afternoon at the mall made me ~almost~ feel like I was home.

Thursday night through Saturday was filled with girlfriends, shower prep, and so much baby talk! Annie made a fantastic cake...

Christie made a really beautiful paper sign...

Cat and Annie constructed the diaper cake...

I made the favors (heat/ice packs filled with rice, flax seeds, and lavender)...

And somehow all the food got made too!

At the shower we played pictionary with baby themed items. Not surprisingly the couple in the group who already has a kid totally rocked this! Carley cleverly illustrated "PackNPlay". She's got a little one on the way too, due just a month after Emily.

Maija took a turn at pictionary. She drew a BIG baby! (Looks like an ultrasound to me!)

Finally we took a big group picture and eventually had to say our goodbyes. Suddenly we are older, grown up, at that age where everyone is having babies and jobs and houses and they are so with it. I came home with the edge of baby giddiness worn off and a little bit weary about my friends getting old! Luckily I'm not anywhere near as old and not nearly half as successful as they are hehe.Here we are, all old and grown up and just the thought makes me overcome with an urge to do something completely irresponsible.

I want to talk for a bit about pictures and beginner photography. So for those of you only tuning in to stalk my life, feel free to tune out now. Up until recently Mark and I have been taking pictures in the beginner mode known as "auto/no flash", AKA "point and shoot". This has been working out in our favor as we have been taking a lot of pictures outdoors or in very well lit areas. A few times Mark has had the time and patience to mess with the settings. An example is the amazing pictures he got of the St. Louis Arch. To be fair to myself, I have messed around a lot with the preprogrammed settings like "kid" or "pet" or "sports" and I have read enough about cameras to not feel dumb when other people talk about them. Ultimately though neither of us have really truly set the camera in manual and made it fly. However, after looking through our pictures from the shower we saw that they turned out a little less than fantastic and that has us pondering how to make future pictures better.

So the debate is this. Should we have shot in the dim indoor setting with the flash? We have a crappy flash. Mark wonders if we had a really nice flash if that would have helped. Or should we have shot in... gasp.... manual... with a wider aperture and F-Stop or some other configuration. Those of you real photographers out there can stop laughing now. But we're learning as we go, and this was this first real "huh" moment for us and to be honest the first time that shooting in plain old auto/no flash didn't give us pictures we felt really happy with. Here are the two group shots: one with flash and one without. Clearly the flash picture turned out better. Now we know!

I'm not entirely convinced a flash (even a nice one) would have done the trick. But alas, I can't go back and retake the exact pictures again with different manual settings. I can play with the pictures in picnik and expose them a little more and saturate the colors and what not. I did that with this cake picture and feel "okay" about the results vs. time and effort.

From what I've been able to tell is that a lot of photographers really value the time and effort spend on photoshop or other picture editing programs as far as making their pictures look good. I don't agree or disagree with this style of picture making, but I do have a goal (and so does Mark) of making the straight-out-of-the-camera shot as good as it possibly can be. My reasoning for this is that why do with a mouse and arrows and 15 minutes what you can do with a twist and click in 5 seconds on the camera? Plus, realistically, just getting those pictures off the SD card, into Picasa, sorted, and uploaded is kind of a miracle. I say let's make them come out of the camera as good as we can!

Regardless of what mode to be shooting in, one thing's for certain. The more pictures we take, the better we'll be! Oh... and I think we might also need a tripod.