I just finished posting to flickr the pictures I took in Old Town Chongqing, China on May 6th, 2008 and here is a smattering of them:

Abigail turns 9 years old tomorrow! Happy Bday! We love you!

Friends (The Winters) called us Tuesday night and offered us their friends (The Crowders) tickets to Disneyland because they made other plans at the last minute and were leaving town, so we picked up the tickets and surprised Abigail for her bday and went on Wednesday night. We got there around 6pm and found out the park was closing at 9pm for grad night, and since I (Todd) was a little bummed we were using the tickets for only three hours, I just casually mumbled to Kim, “I wish we could get passes”, (we had passes years ago and it was nice to be able to go for short visits like this) and so Kim picked up on my comment and went and asked about it, and sure enough we were able to apply the tickets that were given to us and get annual park passes that ended up ‘only’ costing $250 for the whole family! We hadn’t obviously hadn’t budgeted for this, but it was too good an offer to turn down… We got the passes for $50 per person when they are normally $169 per person, and now we will have 215 more opportunities over the next year to hit the park that is only about 15mins from where we live… Hope really loved it at Disneyland. She hit overload after a couple hours, but she especially loved the Tea Cup ride..

Here are some photos from the excursion:

June 11th - Disneyland

And here is the customary link to the slideshow.

Below are some fun videos that I took while we were on rides, like the Tea Cup, Alice in Wonderland, and the Matterhorn:

Teacups:

The Matterhorn:

Alice in Wonderland:

Autopia:

Rocketships:

Bonus: Stunt Doll

Hannah’s bday party on Saturday was a hit… Here is the photo album (107 photos), or view it as a slideshow.

And here is a photo album (41 photos) from our family trip to the park yesterday where Hope played in the sand for the first time ever. It was neat because we took her to the beach one time before and even when we got to the park, we couldn’t get her to engage the sand. She wouldn’t even let her feet touch it. But then after a while Abigail stepped in and after some time playing with her, just plopped her down in the sand and then she was good to go… After that of course she was mad if we took her out of the sand! Click here to view this photo album as a slideshow instead.

I already posted these photos in our gallery, but they were hastily edited using Picasa while we were still in China. These edits below are hosted at flickr.com, and were a little more carefully edited using Ufraw and Gimp, and in most cases I prefer the results I get with gimp over picasa.

These photos were taken during our tour of Tienanmen Square, the Forbidden City, and the Emperor’s Garden.

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.

the kids and i went to civil war reenactment yesterday and we took a ton of photos, and I liked this horse… she had a cute feistyness about her and I liked this capture of her in particular.

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

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

If the mass of photos from the previous post is too much for you, here are some of my favorites from the lot of them, hosted over at flickr.

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)