raising heller

So, we took a short day-trip up to Fort Worden in Port Townsend. It’s where they filmed An Officer and a Gentleman, if you were curious. Anyway, I got some pretty cool photos. Enjoy!

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Two posts in one day… This is definitely a record.

Recently, our friend Carrie Stroud (an amazing photographer) shot some pictures of our family recently and we wanted to share them with you. Here you go!

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we went on our 2nd weekend hike this saturday to a place called franklin falls. it’s somewhat near our last hike at snoqualmie falls. this is probably one of the coolest hikes that we’ve been on as a family. it was about 2 miles, round trip and filled with some of the most lush foliage i’ve seen in a long time. the entire trail ran along the river, generally from about 100-200 feet above it. it made for some very beautiful views. i tried to take some pictures (as seen below) but i don’t think they captured the majesty of it all. i know it sounds like i’m being a little exaggerative, but i promise you i’m not. i’m really stoked that we’ve started doing these weekly family hikes as i think it’s been great for the kids to see what the northwest has to offer.

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grandma and grandpa brown house decided to take the kids to the zoo today so jana and i decided to spend our time well and go for a hike. i’ve heard about a cool hike called rattlesnake ledge. supposedly it wasn’t too difficult (which was a prerequisite for me) and had a killer view from the top. you can see the map of our travels below.

all in all it was really fun. apparently, it’s one of the most popular hikes in washington, which i have no doubt of because we saw soooo many people. most of them seemed like foreigners, which just goes to further prove how popular this hike is. the entire nation of china seemed to be hiking it while we were there. pics below, including a half-decent panorama.

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this has been one of the most all-american 4th of july’s we’ve had together as a family (and we’re not even done yet!). let me give you a run-down of our activities thus far.

we started off with a hike with some friends through cougar mountain. we hiked a couple of miles and the kids were pretty good about it. asher wasn’t too stoked to walk so we ended up carrying him for quite a bit of it. below is the partial map of our walk. i use an app on my iphone called runkeeper that fully maps out walks and runs and the like. it’s actually pretty rad. it will show you the route you took as well as your speed throughout the activity. it even maps out your elevation changes. i forgot to start the app until about 1/2 mile into our hike so it’s incomplete and at one point it shows our speed at around 900mph which i think is a little off.

following the hike we headed over to a neighborhood 4th of july party. it was seriously taken straight from a norman rockwell painting. there were gunny sack races and beanbag tossing and face painting… it was awesome. couple that with the fact that there was free lunch and i was SOLD! unfortunately, most of the pictures didn’t turn out as i had the ISO on my camera set way high and they turned out really grainy. there are the few i got that turned out okay.

all in all, it was a pretty great day. well, it’s not even over yet, but i don’t know what we’re doing this evening. if it’s noteworthy, i’ll post an update.

P.S. – here’s a pano of the park where we had lunch.

P.P.S. – we ended up going to the muckleshoot indian reservation or, “the res” as they call it, to watch a bunch of maniacs light fireworks. seriously, they were all crazy. here’s a pano of the scene, straight out of apocalypse now.

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these are some crime scene photos of our recent cherry pitting massacre.

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our friend kailey took some really great pictures of the kids this weekend. enjoy!

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i know that jana has already posted her valentines day wrap up, but i thought i’d throw mine in as well (read hers first below, for reference). it was cool to be able to go on a walk as a family. it seems like with work and school and all of the different things that we have going on in our household, that we don’t have much time to just have FUN together. the renton waterworks gardens were pretty cool (though i bet it would be a little nicer in the summer) but, more than anything, it was just nice to get out of the house. the kids were able to run around and not worry about being too loud.

to jana: you’re by far the hardest working member of this family. i can’t even begin to fathom how you do all the things you do. my life would be a WRECK without you in it. you’re the bestest! I LOVE YOU!!!

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so, seattle has been hit with some pretty crazy storms the past couple of days. so much so, that i’ve had to miss work twice this past week because we’ve closed our office. this is pretty unusual for our company. anyway, we’re pretty close to having a foot of snow on the ground so we let the kids play around in it this afternoon. jana got me a new lens for our camera (an early Christmas present) so i was testing it out today. a lot of the pictures are pretty washed out. i know what i was doing wrong so we shouldn’t be seeing that again, but with all the white snow, the washed out effect looks pretty cool on some of them. here are a bunch of the pictures. there’s a lot more of lily as she was being a little more cooperative. by the time that i pulled the camera out, asher had had enough and was already inside.

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so, for halloween we had a bunch of friends over, one of which is a photographer. he has a really nice camera and a bunch of gear. well, i was snapping some pics with our canon rebel XT, and he let me use his flash. i couldn’t believe how much difference a real flash made. he aimed the flash at the ceiling. the idea is for the light to bounce of the ceiling and illuminate the subject from above. it really made my pictures stand out. so, i was shooting some more stuff the next day and was a little disappointed to be back to my built-in flash. so i had an idea. what if i positioned a small mirror in front of my flash at about a 45 degree angle to bounce the light of the ceiling? believe it or not, it actually worked very well. i had to hold the mirror in fron of the flash the whole time, so it made it a little harder to shoot, and sometimes i didn’t have it angled quite right so the light was pretty poor. but when it worked, it worked really well. it just made the light a lot less harsh evening it out and making the shot more 3-dimensional. so, if you want to try improving the quality of your photos, give this a try.

picture 1 – this was taken with my camera and the nice flash
picture 2 – this was taken with my stock flash
picture 3 – this was using the small mirror

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