It’s been a while since I’ve wanted to write here – I’ve found myself very much in a place of purposeful seclusion lately. After living publicly online for so many years, all I want is privacy these days.

I sure got it last week – we spent 7 days up in heaven Michigan in a rented home in Twin Lake. It’s the second time we’ve been up there. And it was the first time I faced the end of a vacation and truly wanted to stay another week. I’m usually ready for my own bed, but not this time.

This was the dock in our backyard. The kids pulled fish out of the water left and right. Every night was a gorgeous sunset. Like I said – heaven!

We interrupt our current programming for a gushing mom moment.

My husband and I are horribly right brained. We’re always late. Can’t remember much. House eternally messy. But with these curses comes amazing creativity. And as if we didn’t already know – this picture makes it obvious that our daughter inherited it from both sides.

All of our kids are very creative – but what makes this especially awesome is that it was drawn with no input or help at all from anyone – by my daughter who is 7. SEVEN! If I drew like this at that age my work would be hanging in the Art Institute by now.

I once wrote about how I used to get SAD – Seasonal Affective Disorder. I’m kind of puzzled now as to why I wrote “used to” in that post, because there are some ok winters and some bad winters – but it happens every winter. I guess this year it isn’t so bad – but this is the worst time of year for it. So I decided to go through my summer photos today to add a shot to The Photoblog in the hopes of it taking my mind off of this.

This photo was a little tricky to play with, because I found the overexposed white area on my son’s neck to be a little distracting. But any attempts at toning it down looked like I colored on the photo with a crayon. So I ended up playing with the levels a tiny bit and brightening up the rest of the shot to deemphasize it. I lowered the white point in the levels so that it became at least less white than my screen. I also put a soft focus on the image, but removed it in that area because the glow was only intensifying the problem. It’s not perfect, but at least you can now see the three absolute best parts of the shot:

The drip of water on his nose

The laughing girl licking up the sprinkler water from her fingers – this was purely accidental bokeh that I swooned over when I discovered it hours later!

The sprinkler spray in front of the hair and shirt – I had to dodge those out a bit more to really make them show through

One of my goals this year is to get more photographs of my kids doing their thing – candid shots when they don’t know I am looking. While I love their goofy grins and prima donna poses – it’s photos like this that really let me hold onto the moments in time that will be gone too soon.

It’s kind of hard to go on and on about how much I love Chicago when it is the middle of January. But winter is a distant memory come May, when this photo was taken in 2008. It is one of my favorite all time shots – the light on the Chicago River cruise was exquisite - and I know that sounds so cliche, but it’s true. Everything was glowing. I was running all over the roof of the boat snapping pictures as fast as I could. Lots of them came out fuzzy, but this one is my pride and joy.

Rain is so important in Bermuda – did you know that there is no fresh water supply on the entire island? No lakes, no streams, no nothin’. So by law all of the buildings there have to have a water collection system in place – kinda cool. This rain never actually made it to the island – it was so hot (in August!) that any rain that tried to come down evaporated almost immediately.

I wish I could remember all the Photoshop processing steps I did in this shot, because it is significantly enhanced from the original. I started with a light HDR treatment with ReDynaMix, pumped up the colors a whole bunch, and added an edge burn from Ree Drummond’s free Photoshop Action Sets. Plus other things I can’t remember. I kind of got lost in the artistic process on this one.

I will totally adit I was quite astonished I was able to pull this shot off. I’m dying for a real SLR, and my usually-trusty point and shoot was having a very difficult time focusing in the right spot. It kept wanting to focus on the trees behind the dragonfly. Thankfully I got the shot before he flew away!

Since I’ve only owned my copy of Photoshop CS4 for less than a week, I am totally cheating by using other people’s PS actions until I relearn how to do everything all over again. CS4 is miles ahead of my ancient version 7. This shot was a simple treatment – the “Seventies” action from Ree Drummond’s Photoshop Action Sets. I did at least toy with the adjustment layers.

See? I feel I totally need to make excuses for myself! I’ll shut up now.

I got this Buddha statue at Target when they used to do their wonderful International Bazaar in January a few years ago (*sniff* I miss that section!!). He’s now sitting on my desk with a few other Buddhas as a way to remind to me chill the heck out on life and breathe. I guess I’m not doing myself any favors by having his face half covered up right now with my kids’ school papers and a dirty plate from yesterday’s breakfast. *Sigh* Such is the life of the chronic mess-maker!

Most people don’t know that we are a river rat family. My husband is addicted to finding decrepid boats, fixing them, expensively fixing his first round of fixups and turning out close to new beautiful boats. You know what B.O.A.T. stands for, right? “Bring on Another Thousand”.

Oh, if it were only that simple. I could tell you about the time the boat almost sank, the time the trailer broke in two while driving, the flat tires… but when we get out on the water, one moment of this makes it all worth it!