gem glasses

we went and played on the Clackamas River today with our friends heidi and gemma and their children. a perfect kind of day. 

above is gemma in large glasses, a trick of the light made this a really fun picture. as ever, i exhort viewers to click on the color pics, as blogger loves to leach the life from my photos. grrr.

river treasure

heidi, anatole, and oscar's hands 'sharing' a tiny snail.

oscar and heidi

olive

with blackberry juice.

we's a company

these last two posts conclude our Maine installment. here we are with some of our dearest friends in the whole-wide world. andrew (in plaid) you saw with us in NM pictures; to his right, his big sister (and my college roomie) Jane (and wee) and her man, Joe -- recipients of knitted blanket featured in earlier photos.

to be quite honest, this is my least favorite type of picture...a whole group of people painfully geared up for a photograph that no one really wants to be in...i tried taking others, but these three were so blasted recalcitrant in front of the camera they successfully foiled all of my most charming attempts to capture them beautifully. yeah, laugh it up guys, i assure you the battle is not over. rats, now i have to go out and take a whole 'nother batch of photos. 

b&w boy in blue

Scruffy, mit a smidgeon of self-satisfaction. 

laurel

e's lovely mum, in Kennebunkport.

lisa's pizza

early morning has a way of beautifying even the most humble subjects. click on this to see colors. like scratch 'n' sniff for the modern era.

blue genie

carnival at Old Orchard Beach. this photo looks like old oatmeal now, so click on it. trust me.

faux HDR

the underbelly of the pier is a wondrously aggravating piece of work to capture photographically. the wood has weathered into tremendous shades and the light falls into a natural chiaroscuro that makes visually-hungry people like me drool...but the lens is not quite as intelligent as the eye, so all the rigor of this shot is in the post-production. pictures like this are usually taken in several different bracketed exposures and then 'tone mapped' to bring out detail in even highlighted and shaded areas, these images are called 'high dynamic range', or HDR. since i made only one exposure i faked it with my RAW converter and a whole lot of masked curves. i relay all this photo-geek gibberish purely for my own satisfaction, as this picture took me about as long as all the other ones combined, and i'm reasonably satisfied with the product (not perfectly, but i'm still pretty happy). you all probably thought i was done with maine photos, but oh no, there are more to come, i've just been busy blowing my nose, hacking, knitting, and going for long walks with the boy. autumn has arrived in portland.