Joyce

Guess who?

Guess who these cute princesses are.
Bonus points if you know how old they are. 🙂

Decorating Cookies

Megan learned how to decorate cookies yesterday.Â She had a lot of fun helping to decorate the cookies the girls made to share as Valentines at church last night.

I found this picture ofÂ just turned four Audrey recently. When she was little, she almost always had her thumb in her mouth and a band-aidÂ somewhere.Â It was rare that she wasn’t smiling, so she must have been very tired when I took this picture.

Another Study in Blue

When Megan was little, I took a picture of her sleeping on this blue background.Â When Mark brought up this blue plaid shirt he loves Megan to wear, I knew I wanted to repeat the “Study in Blue“.

Her shirt is the matching one from two years ago (we had bought matching ones for Mark and Andrea when they were tiny). I had thought to change her into overalls, but I like the jeans.Â She still sleeps like a toddler, but that is changing too.

I am especially proud of these pictures.Â I have been attempting to use M (manual) on my camera and these are the first pictures that I did using light from the window and all the settings set manually without any help.

Snuggling

According to Megan, very few things are better than snuggling with your big brother when you get up from your nap.

Mark says that snuggling with your little sister when she wakes up is great too.

Sledding

I love this picture!Â It has everything I want in a good sledding picture; movement, expression and snow flying.Â However, the original was not quite right, so I played with it.Â It’s different, but IÂ like it a lot better now. 🙂

Sledding Experiments

The kids have been sledding a lot this week. It was supposed to warm up and rain, and we wanted to enjoy the snow before it was gone.

I did some research on how to get good pictures with snow, and read that I should overexpose my shots some.Â I learned that does not work for sledding because, while the snow stays white, the people are overexposed.Â I also read to set my shutter priority high (say 800 -1000) to catch the action.Â Well….it worked too well, my pictures turned out looking like the kids sat on the sled screaming for fun.

Another idea that I tried was exposing for the sky (I cheated and used the Program mode to tell me what it was) and then setting my shutter speed to around 200.Â With my ISO at 200, and tweaking the exposure a little, I finally came up with some pictures that I like!Â I still need to practice, but I am sure that if we get more snow, the kid won’t mind sledding some more.