Scattered Thoughts . . .

A fter my previous blog entry where I was complaining about a crappy Olympus camera sensor and sensor format, I decided to shoot a few photos of some of our Christmas ornaments in a much larger sensor format...  645 medium format with a classic medium format manual lens.   These images look great!  I did nothing with these images other than some very mild sharpening before resizing them down to web-sized images in contrast to the images in the previous blog entry that required hours of processing.   Shooting these images was incredibly simple and yet they look great!  

L ukey and Kenzie have been dying to take a long distance trip on Amtrak for many years.  Last Christmas, we were booked to take Amtrak to Manhattan with Lukey and Kenzie but our train was cancelled as we were waiting for it to arrive in Waterbury.  It was cancelled due to flooding here in Vermont and, at the last minute, we decided our only option was to drive down to Manhattan instead.  That means Lukey and Kenzie missed out on a huge part of last Christmas' surprise trip.  That Amtrak travel was supposed to be the highlight of the trip but it was cancelled! They were definitely sorely disappointed but we still had a great time in Manhattan at Christmastime.  That train cancellation really put a big damper on the trip though which we were reminded of constantly during the long 12 hours in the car contending with heavy rain, traffic, and detours in a cramped car rather than a long train allowing us to get up and walk whenever we felt the need.  Having to s...

T his morning, I wrote about Lukey's Christmas gift from Gee and Papa.  I wrote about his gift separately because there was an interesting story pertaining to how he got his gift.  The rest of the grandchildren opened their gifts just like everyone else around the world...   tearing off wrapping paper like a monkey on a cupcake! Tonight, I'll share some photos of the rest of the grandchildren opening some of their Christmas gifts. Kenzie stayed with us for the weekend so she opened one of her gifts on the previous day.  We gave her two pairs of boots...  one for everyday playing in the snow and a nice pair of boots for special occasions.  We figured she would want to wear the nice pair of boots for our night out so we had her open that one gift on the previous afternoon.  Then...  she had to wait patiently for the rest of the grandchildren to arrive before she could open the rest of her gifts. Sophie was in a very happy, festive, and playful ...