Where is the ANY key?!

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Kate and I recently attended a holiday party at our friends in PA.  We had a wonderful time and there are some nice shots I took up here.

And for the tacky decorations … people who live in our development have the loudest, tackies and most annoying decorations.  They are horribly annoying and I can hear them in my house over 20 yards away while I am indoors.
Short video of decorations taken by cell.

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I was playing around with the RAW shooting on my camera.  It’s amazing how much cropping and cleaning up you can do in RAW without losing quality as compared to JPEG which butchered my few decent shots.  Most impressed.

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On Saturday Kate and I went Christmas Tree shopping with her parents.  This has been our annual tradition since our first Christmas in our apartment.  The only year we didn’t do it was the year we moved into the new condo, but that was only because we closed on December 13th.  We got an awesome tree:

And I was able to spend some time to play around and take photos while there.   I have finally started to do some post production work on my shots to reduce some of the ambient noise in the photos, straighten horizons and sharpen details.  I also had a chance to play with the macro setting:

On Sunday Kate got to decorate the tree:

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I have finally gotten off my lazy ass and uploaded some of my recent photographic adventures to the photos page.   A sample is below

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So I am finally sending my Aunt Rose the shadowbox I made for her. When we all went to Virginia Beach in June to celebrate her retirement from the Navy, she surprised the whole family with a very informal beach wedding to her fianc, Harry. It was short, sweet, and incredibly beautiful. I wanted to document it for her and send her something to remember her special day. Not only would she not have a professional album full of photos, she wouldn’t even have an invitation or a guest book to remember it by. So, Dave took the photos and I scrapbooked it into a shadowbox that she can hang and look at every day. I hope she likes it…

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Kate and I went Pumpkin Picking today. Photos available.

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On Sunday Kate’s parents took us to another cooking class at The Mystic Cooking School. It was a class based on brunch and was amazingly good. The menu was:

Minty Grape and Honeydew Fruit Salad with Midori Reduction; Monte Cristo (ham and Swiss) French Toast with Port Maple Syrup; Zucchini, Spinach, and Parmesan Rolled Egg Souffle topped with Oven-dried Tomato Cream Sauce; Fresh Herbed Pulled Pork Shoulder over Cheesy Grits with Scallions; Mascarpone and Berry-filled Crepes with Raspberry Coulis

The food was fantastic, especially the pulled pork. I also quite enjoyed the Monte Cristo French Toast and the Crapes were fantastic!

I had my camera with me and took some decent shots. I was not using the flash indoors as to not disturb other patrons and I think that caused the shots to come out a bit yellowish. I need to learn how to counteract that, if at all possible. I did have some fun in macro mode though:

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This is the class of cruise ship Kate and I have gone on twice (and soon to be three times) docked at the small pier closest to Kate’s home town.  We passed this beast taking up the entire pier on I-95 when coming home from Saturday morning breakfast.  The picture isn’t the best as we were blowing by while on the highway, on a bridge and I was trying to shoot from the moving car and in-between support beams.

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