MASSIVE PHOTO BLOG

From J:

It's here!  Our new camera!  Look at a picture of it taken with my crappy iPhone camera!

That will be the last crappy photo in this post.  As this is the first new camera we've gotten in a few years, we got to play with all of the fun features that have been added in since the dark ages of digital photography.  First, a test photo of some of the wildlife around our apartment:

Yeah...our complex isn't very wild.  Now, let's show off a bit.  First up, our surrogate child, the tomato plant.

Yo.  Those are blossoms.  And look at the fine detail on those hairs!  Impressive.  After we took a few photos around our complex, we went for a walk out to the agricultural gardens.  Among the sites we saw:

A building across the street from our complex.  Made slightly more interesting using "film grain" mode, which makes the image grainy.  And black and white.  Like old-timey film!

A rollerblader.  Dude, 1995 called.

A lamp post covered in a climbing, flowering vine.  Unlike the rollerblading man, this was actually interesting.

A's favorite photo of the evening? Taken behind the agrictultural building.  This was shot using the "intelligent auto" mode on the camera, which was smart enough to 1) recognize that we were shooting a picture of flowers and 2) tell me that we were shooting flowers.  It also entered macro mode automatically.  Slick.

Sweet.  Sunset over the agricultural fields.  This was taken using "sunset" mode, which worked darn well, in my opinion.

Judicious use of film-grain mode makes a bench look old-timey.

As I am a sucker for magnolias, here's a picture of one.  They're blooming all over campus right now and it's lovely.

We used blue hydrangias in our wedding, so it was a nice surprise to find several bushes of them behind the ag building.  This particular flower has three colors, which is two colors more interesting than just blue.

I might take some of these photos and artsy them up using GIMP.  Stay tuned for some awesome food blogs - our food will look ~12.1 megapixels better.

GIMP

From J:

In my triumphant return to blogging, I will happily announce that we're getting a new camera.  This one.  No longer will our photos be limited by my crappy iPhone camera!  Though that one is still excellent for candid shots, like this one:

I think they missed the point of "vegetarian."  And especially "vegan."  As seen at a local Asian grocery.  In a related question, what is fish ham?

Pictured: the elusive tropical hamfish.

Back to the topic at hand!  Now that A and I will have some quality photos coming our way, I looked into some image editing software.  Since I don't feel like pirating Photoshop, I downloaded an open-source alternative called GIMP.  It's pretty powerful.  Playing around last night, I did this:

Look at me, being all artsy.  This is one of our recent anniversary photos.  To do this edit, you overlay a black-and-white copy of the image and selectively make the color image opaque (or, to think about it another way, selectively make the black-and-white version transparent).  Pretty easy (if a bit time intensive) and the results are nice.

Tomato Plant Update

From A:

Who knew a plant could provide us with so much entertainment?!

The big news from our porch is that we have tomato blossoms!  And, not surprisingly, the plant continues to grow at a somewhat frightening rate.  Here are the latest pictures:

The camera conveniently focused on the parts of the plant I wasn't trying to highlight and made the blossoms a little blurry (thanks, iPhone).  But you can sort of seem them in the foreground.

Attack of the Killer Tomato Plant

From A:

I mentioned last week that our tomato plant is growing like crazy.  Here is photo evidence.

Right after planting:

One week later:

Oh, wait, wrong picture.

One week later:

It's actually gotten a little bigger even since I took that photo.  Now we just need it to produce some blossoms and we'll be in business!

Mom's Day

From A:

Happy Mother's Day to the wonderful mothers of J and A.  We are both so blessed to have incredible mothers whose influence has helped make us the people we are today. 

My mom taught me to be a stronger person -- to stand up for myself, to find a way to do what needed to be done, and to not be intimidated by male-dominated activities (play tennis and flag football with the boys, participate in ROTC, be an engineer, etc).

I don't know what J would say his mom taught him, but I'll take a guess at what it would be.  I think she taught him the value of being a good person - of doing the right thing even when it's not the easiest, most convenient, or popular thing to do.

So to our mothers: thanks for all you taught us when we were young, thanks for the friends you are to us today, and thanks for continuing to provide us with motherly wisdom, advice, and insight when we need it.  We love you both!

Caption Winner

From A:

And the winning caption is...

*DRUMROLL*

Honorable mention...

Caption Time!

From A:

I'm going to embarrass J on this post.

I was going through old pictures and couldn't pass up the chance to get this photo on the blog:

And now that it's been posted, it needs a caption!  Come on, this should be so easy considering how many Tiger Woods jokes have been going around (and I know our readers will keep it G rated).

So leave a message with your best caption.  The winner will be announced on the next blog post and will win my admiration for all eternity.

Updates

From A:

I forgot to take a picture of it, but the tomato plant on our porch has nearly quadrupled the size it was when we planted it!  Apparently we're doing something right.  Let's just hope it ends up producing some mini tomatoes for us.  The other plants are also doing well, with the jade being the next-fastest grower.

A combination of weather (a high of 94 degrees) and the fact that our condo complex is nearly empty since it's the week between spring and summer semesters inspired us to do something we've never done before... swim in our complex's pool*!

*The pool looks nothing like this.

The water was warmish cool (cool enough to be refreshing) and one of the buildings blocked the setting sun to protect our pale skin from being burned, so it was perfect for us.  As an added bonus, there weren't any students with kegs playing beer pong or listening to Ke$ha.

We've also gotten some more sample photos from our photographer.  We should get the DVD with all the images by tomorrow, and then I'll have my work cut out for me to sort through 700 pictures to find our favorites.  I don't mind it, though, because I love working with pictures.

Here are a few of the latest sample images we've gotten (I'm soooo ready to see them all!):

The last picture was taken in J's lab where he does research.  I'm so excited that we were able to get some pictures of him in the lab, since we didn't have any before.  As you can see, I even put some gloves on at the end of the photo shoot and joined the action!