Fun in the sun

Are you tired yet of all the photos at the park from this summer?

I just can't help myself when the sun is shining near sunset.  Believe me, we had plenty of sunsets covered in clouds.  So when it's shining, I can't help but capture some sun flare.  I love the feeling of being drenched in the sun.  

We are still enjoying our afternoons and evenings at the park by the river, when we're not running to dance or baseball.  It truly has become our most favorite-y favorite place to be second to home.

The kids love to race each other through the field as we make our way from the playground to the river.

Then they can't help trying to skip throwing rocks into the water.

We love this place!!!!

I'm linking up with my friend, Kim.  Be sure to stop by her blog for more little things.

Evening at the river

We spent a lot of late afternoons/early evenings down at the park by the river this summer, thanks in large part to the photography class I took.  It not only pushed me past my comfort zone, it also pushed me right out of my house!  The dumplings didn't mind a bit, though we still had to make sure we got our swimming in, too.

Evenings by the river are the perfect opportunity to shoot silhouettes. This one was my favorite of the night.

The sunset wasn't as spectular as the night a few weeks back when the kids were grouchy, but it was still lovely.

And it got lovelier as the night went on.

Daddy even managed to sneak into a shot.

I just love, love, love silhouettes.  I love the challenge of removing clutter from an image and capturing the the shape of an object or person.  Silhouettes evoke mystery.  Love that.  And don't think that silhouettes are just for sunrise or sunset.  I'm also enjoying shooting silhouettes during the daytime too, like a few shots I took when we were vacationing in Miami.

I shot all these images with my Nikon D700 using my 50mm 1.4 lens.
My settings for the first shot were f/8 SS 1/250 ISO 250.

For more great photos, visit Stefanie and Rebecca's blogs.

 

What we're up to

Gosh, you have no idea how it bums me out that I haven't been snapping away behind my camera much since my photography class ended last week.  As I look through all the photos I've taken this summer, I'm proud of myself for stepping out of my comfort zone.  The class was the push I needed to try different things.  And I'm pleased as punch.

I soooo wish I had the time to get out there and continue shooting, but I've been bitten by the packing-up-your-house bug. It's amazing how many boxes we have already filled and placed in the garage yet we've hardly put a dent in packing up.  *Sigh*

On the house hunting front, we haven't seen anything new listed.  So we haven't been out looking.  Our own house has been shown 4 times since being listed.  We've had positive feedback from the showing agents.  So we're feeling good about the potential buyers being out there somewhere and ready to make an offer in the not so far off future.  Fortunately these showings haven't affected our schooling.  So this has been an answer to prayer.

On the adoption front, you may be wondering what's happened to our paperwork.  Well, we've had 3 documents expire so that the Chinese Embassy won't authenticate them.  That means I've spent this week obtaining a new police clearance for me (easy enough) and a new marriage license and birth certificate for Patrick.  Then we'll have to get all three state sealed before sending them off for authentication.  While I'm not particularly thrilled about them being expired by just a few days, I know that in the "big picture", this snag doesn't mean much. And I'm okay with that. We'll still be DTC in September, which is fine with us.

So that about sums up this past week.  And since I haven't taken any new photos, I thought I would go ahead and share these cute ones I took of the kids a few weeks ago with my studio lights.  I would normally pay closer attention to the background so as to minimize the cloning when editing the images (you may recall this paper is sized for headshots, not multiple kids.)  But I just wanted to snap a few of them and not worry about finding the time to edit them.