Sunsets are fun to catch when they are this pretty!

The sunset was beautiful tonight so I stopped along the road on the way to capture it! What always amazes me how quickly it it disappears. Even by the time I was putting the camera away, the sky had turned black…amazing!

Old Toy

Just love the bright colors of this old Tonka truck that was Minsan’s when he was a little boy. Isn’t it great when your own kids can play with your own toys from when you were a kid?

Summertime Flowers!

I just love the summertime flowers in my yard when they are in full bloom.

I always get a kick out of my globe thistle plant. If I didn’t know that I had planted them, I would have pulled them out as weeds months ago!

Coneflowers are always a favorite for me too! I am glad that they are growing bigger and more plentiful in my garden! Wonderful!

 

Here is my liatris too! They are really quite beautiful even though they don’t bloom for very long.

I love the pink and purple flowers in my yard. I do add yellows and whites as accents, but my true favorites are the purple and pink ones!

Beautiful Niece!

Andrea is more than half way through her pregnancy and looking completely lovely. I love this picture and all the wonderful color in it!

Outside my front door lies sweetness…at least to me!

This was during the evening when the kids were all tucked in. it was cool to take the pictures as the sun was going down…the richness of the color was wonderful!

I love these daisies  below when the sun had gone down.

Swing Redo

The original picture I took on the 4th of July:

Here is a partially cropped version:

Here is the fully cropped version….totally different picture eh?! 

Sonoma Valley and San Francisco

My sister is in California on a little vacation and she has been taking these beautiful pictures of her adventures. I couldn’t help but share a couple of them!

Here are two from San Francisco!

4th of July gathering!

We had been invited to the Annual 4th of July gathering at the our friends the Anderson’s. They love celebrating the 4th of July since it is after all Ashlee’s favorite holiday! It was actually a lot of fun to join them in celebration. I ran around taking pictures of everyone! I really love capturing candid shots of kids (and a few others of course). Ashlee’s kidlets are perfect for that too!

There was lots of eating, visiting, games to play and even some time for song. For the purposes of this post though I just really wanted to share my artistic kid shots! My goal is still to capture some great color while trying my darndest to be creative….I am still learning I will fully admit to that!

I just thought this pic below was so sweet. Nothing beats grandma and granddaughter hand in hand.

Field Mountain

Here is another one! The above is pre-noise reduction.

This one above is noise reduced so it is better, but the one below is just as I remembered it, vibrant and beautiful! The reason I loved this shot too was that the clouds took on the look of mountains (in my eyes at least!). Just a cool picture to me!

Time to Rest

Of course I keep venturing back to my favorite pictures from last year that were really cool, but somehow lacking something when there was too much noise. I found this one and ran the noise reduction software on it. It made it better….

Then I ran the Vivid action from coffeeshop blog and it made it just how I remembered it in person…ooooohhhhh so beautiful!

Another Ride on the Motorcycle!

I went for a spin on the motorcycle on Sunday afternoon. My goal was to have coffee with my sister…but on the way to her home is this lovely field with horses. I had driven by this very location one day when the sun was just right and the horses were actually frolicking in the pond. That was a rare, rare moment in time that I didn’t have my camera with and I could have just kicked myself!

Since that day I have been very watchful of that area hoping that the horses would be there again. I left the house yesterday really hoping that they would be there. Sure enough they were out in the field. They weren’t frolicking in the water, but thankfully they were out and about and I could take advantage of the photo opportunity.  

 

Sunset pictures from the Chain of Lakes

Last summer I took this picture above while boating on the Chain of Lakes by Cold Spring, MN. To capture the picture on a moving boat I had the ISO up as high as my Canon Rebel would go. One other thing to note is that I had not been introduced to the CoffeeShop Actions site when this picture was taken or other sites like Digital Photography for Moms either than taught me about digital noise and correcting it with free software and actions.

So while on my search for orange, I had ran into this picture that I had always loved, but had some serious noise issues from the high ISO. I ran the Noiseware Community Edition software that I downloaded last week and it miraculously fixed the noise…amazing. Then I ran the vivid action from CoffeeShop and WOW! My picture came even more to life and is better than I could have ever, ever, ever imagined!

Thank you CoffeeShop and Digital Mom Photography!!!

St. Cloud Photowalk (11)

St. Cloud Photowalk (7)