We had a wonderful time celebrating our friend Bella’s 5th bday on Saturday.

Photo album

Or Photo Slideshow

Video of gift opening time:

Video of cake time:

Our friends the Rodriguez family invited us to a Civil War Reenactment this past weekend, and asked me to try out my new camera at the event. So Jonathan, Abigail and I went on Sunday and were able to relive some American history at Prado Regional Park in Chino, Ca. The battle photos were from the Sunday 2pm reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg. This featured mounted calvary, infantry and full scale artillery demonstrations. Our friend Huatzin was fighting for the North, for 1USSS Company C, Berdan Sharp Shooters. (You’ll notice them in green).

So are you ready to view 571 pictures? I thought so! All three of us went equipped with cameras to this event, and we went nuts with the cameras the whole time we were there (a few hours)… There were so many photos to weed through and edit that it forced me to come up with an easier way to mass edit photos. I explored a few different applications and found that for my purposes, Picasa was best suited for handling this many photos. I had tried it before but hadn’t given it a fair chance, and while there are some things I don’t like about it and things that could be better, it is one great piece of freeware, and I am sure it’s going to get better as they continue to develop it.

If you whoever you are happen to see photos that you want to print, just contact me with the pictures you want, and I’ll send you full resolution copies.

If you’re detail oriented you’ll notice that many of my photos (in the Todd albums) are over-exposed. I was using a (borrowed) zoom lens for the first time and am just learning how to use it. (I also get to take this zoom with me to China when we go end of month!). I was spending a lot of time in “auto picture” mode to play it safe because I often ruin or miss shots by messing with settings too much in manual mode. All the over exposed shots happened in Auto mode so my guess is I just wasn’t paying enough attention to the camera and relying on its auto ability too much. I went ahead and kept a lot of these shots anyway and just tried to do effects with them, like black and white, or sepia, or film grain (just using Picasa)…

Here are links to the individual sub-albums:

Abigail’s camp photos 51 photos, using a Canon A510 3mp	Abigail’s battle photos 19 photos, using a Canon A510 3mp
Jonathan’s camp photos 83 photos, using a Nikon Coolpix 5mp	Jonathan’s battle photos 82 photos, using a Nikon Coolpix 5mp
Todd’s camp photos 60 photos, using a Pentax K100D 6mp (mostly using a Tamron 70-300mm AF zoom lens that a friend loaned me.)	Todd’s battle photos 270 photos, using a Pentax K100D 6mp (using a Tamron 70-300mm AF zoom lens that a friend loaned me.)
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Or click here go to the top level album of these sub-albums and be your own viewing boss.

Some photos from our visit to the USC campus on Monday…

click here to view this photo album using your whole browser window…

Below are nine photo albums from our Easter party at the Winters house on Sunday:

If you want to view the album slideshows in full screen, then I suggest installing PicLens for your browser. Once installed, come on back and click on the Piclens icon in the bottom left of a picture (pops up when you hover over an image with your mouse) in order to kick off a 3D fullscreen slideshow.

plugins like wp gallery remote and lightbox are some of the reasons i finally decided to move tmphillips.com to wordpress.. these particular plugins allow one to access any available menalto gallery via the gallery remote protocol to easily link and display images in wordpress posts and pages… here’s my first test of the plugins… i tried the carousel mode first, which didn’t work. so this is plain mode, and while it takes up a lot of real estate, it sure is quick and easy… I will be trying wpg2 next…

(you can right and left arrow through the pictures as a slideshow when the lightbox window loads, and use the esc key to close when finished…)

{wp-gallery-remote: gallery=0; rootalbum=39967; showalbumtitle=true; showsubalbums=false; showimagesheader=false; thumbsize=90;imagefilter=include:39968,39977,39997,40005,40025,40045,40117,40121,40141,40153,40193,40229,40237,40241,40249,40253,40257,40101,40113,40165;}

we had a fund raising garage sale on saturday and a luau baby shower for friends on sunday and we kind of went nuts with the camera…

20080315 -garage sale - other (18 images)
or full screen slideshow (run the .exe, 3.67MB)

20080315 - garage sale - macintosh (44 images)
or full screen slideshow (run the .exe, 8.73MB)

20080315 - garage sale - rodriguez (34 images)
or full screen slideshow (run the .exe, 7.84MB)

20080315- garage sale - mcstay (23 images)
or full screen slideshow (run the .exe, 4.22MB)

20080316 - hurst baby shower (74 images)

Happily wedded on Saturday the 28th of October

Sean had us over for an amazing (7 course) celebratory feast last night..

Go here for more information about what and why.

Go here for some picture viewing of the evening.

We thoroughly enjoyed our friends, and the amazing culinary experience. It was an occasion to remember and an honor to be there.

my good buddy joe over at ashland longboards recently hooked me up with an upgraded longboard skateboard model, and all i can say is wow! i took it out for a spin earlier… what a smooth ride! i am not a skateboarder, but anybody can enjoy one of these boards… a couple more practice rides, and i will be taking my first cruise to the local starbucks on it!