My pictures might not be as good as the ones here, but I really enjoyed having some free time to experiment with the camera while Marichu went shopping with the kids at the Metreon.

   Here, I was trying to take a photo to show what the perspective would be for one of the birds sitting in the water.

   I really like the sharp focus on the pigeon, but I should've positioned the camera higher, so I could get a clearer reflection of the bird in the water.

   I took the following shot from below -- lying down on the ground, which made Isabel look like a giant. The moon appears very faintly next to her right elbow, but I have no idea what the other two white dots are. Alas, I haven't had time to start playing with Photoshop or other photo editing programs to touch up my pictures.

   And lastly, a classic shot (I should've shot it in black and white) of Mary June playing with Lilie and Isabel.

   As I start to take more and more pictures with the new camera, I'm noticing that many of my shots of moving objects (which require my hands to follow along) are blurry. I mean, I would be lucky to get one focused shot out of 15 or so. Then I read about the "Image Stabilizer" lenses and quickly decided to get myself an early Christmas present, so I can take plenty of good action shots during our family's upcoming holiday road trip to visit relatives and friends back in the Bay Area.

   The lens that I found to be highly and consistently recommended is the Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM. Well, to my surprise, it arrived this morning via FedEx, which usually doesn't deliver on Sundays, but the delivery guy said they were making up lost time because of the snowy conditions last week.

   So, with the new lens in hand, I immediately started to take pictures of one of my favorite subjects, Isabel. Here she is playing happily.

   I noticed that the sunlight would provide a pretty good B&W picture, so I took a few, and I'm very happy with the results.

   B&W photos definitely provide a more classic, timeless look than colored ones.

   Then Joseph joined in on the fun. I switched back to color because I wanted to capture the vividness of the background.

   Lastly, I took a couple of portraits of Joseph. Wow, how quickly he has grown! Soon, he'll be a teenager and probably won't want to take anymore pictures. Well, I guess I just have to take as many of him as I can before that happens.

I was trying to take an action shot of Joseph (in the center of the photo) while running down the court during this basketball yesterday, but instead, my camera produced this rather amazing shot of some other kid (who coincidentally happened to be the one with the ball). The blurring of everything around him makes the picture look almost 3-D!

   It had snowed a little on Sunday afternoon, but it really started to come down last night, and this morning, there were about two inches of snow around our house.

   I tested out my camera to see if it could capture the falling snow on Sunday, and at ISO 1600 speed, the photo turned out pretty good. I also played around with the manual aperture setting to let in more light than the camera would in full auto mode, so the photo appears to have been taken in the afternoon even though I actually took it at around dusk. The other picture is the “after” from this morning.

   The third picture of the lighted Christmas tree in front of our house was taken on Sunday night. I tried various manual settings, but it was the best that I could do. I definitely need more training/practice with night shots – I think a monopod or tripod will help a lot.