Playing around with my new camera

Some pictures of flowers I took last weekend while visiting the parents. Just trying out the macro feature of my new camera that lets me take pictures of things from supposedly 1 cm away. Never tried quite that close, but did try an inch or two distance. At some point I might play with photoshop to improve them.

I'm not too happy with the way the first picture came out, but I kind of like some of the others.

While I was there, we had a party for my grandma's 80th birthday. Most of her kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids were there (just missing 3 grandkids and one grandkid's spouse I think), so we all got together to take a family group picture. Unfortunately, some people were hidden in all of my group shots. I've been trying to patch a couple of people back in via photoshop. Here's the rough effort so far:

This isn't the final picture I want to put the two people back into, but it's just something I was practicing with. If you look closely it's fairly obvious where I added back in Britta (blonde in back row peaking out behind her mom in the yellow top--you can see that I didn't actually delete her from this picture where her hair is sticking out on the other side of her mom because I didn't know how to do that with the drapes hanging down. The other person I inserted was Dezire (pink shirt second rown behind the girl in the green dress with glasses). Originally, she was sitting on her foster mom Janelle's lap, but most of her was cut out by the pew end, so I moved the pew end out a little further to cover the rest of her (seem is really obvious) and pasted her in from another picture when she's actually sitting in that location from when just the great grandkids were sitting around my grandma. To be honest, I'm most proud of my completion of the pattern on Janelle's shirt that was hidden behind th original pew post and that wasn't even that great of a job.

Here's the original group photo I was working with:

And here's the great grandkids with grandma shot I stole Dezire's head from:

Britta's head came from this one:

I'm still going through my group shots to find the best one I want to use to try this for real, but I don't think it'll be any of these that ends up serving as the base.

I don't know why clicking on the first three pictures leads to larger version of the picture, but the last two doesn't. Any suggestions?

A few more pictures I thought I'd add.


From my lab's new homepage (http://www.bmb.msu.edu/faculty/kroos/KroosLabPage.htmedu/faculty/kroos/KroosLabPage.htm):













A couple of pictures from my wedding:



































Wow, 2 and a half years have gone fast...

And now for my favorite wedding photo of us:

Where I wish I was right now:













instead of:



Although sledding would be more fun than sitting here in the lab.











Playing Tarzan on my first picnic with Debbie:















And finally, taking a nap with my neice:

So I found an old picture of myself at work from my lab's website (http://www.bch.msu.edu/labs/krooslab.html) and thought I'd include it, so anyone who finds this can see what I do all day...

Test Posting of old photos

Some old pictures of me as I have been:
A year ago...

Several years ago...



6 or 7 years ago...


Man, that was one snowy Christmas. I never thought my Dad would send my up to the roof with a shovel and tell me to shovel it off, but we had well over a foot (over two feet I think) up there and it had to come down before it damaged the roof. I miss that old car (and that old backboard I painted). It was the first car that was all mine, with my name on the title and everything. It was a pain to drive in the summer as the only way I could keep it from overheating was to drive with the heater on full blast and the windows down. Those were some sweaty nights, but it was all mine...

The little building off in the upper right corner we always called "the house." It was a little shed that my dad built that used to be out by the road (our house was surrounded by woods and not visible from the road), that my sister and I used to wait for the schoolbus in when it was cold or rainy until it got too full of spiders and we got too embarrassed about all the comments about how we were coming out of the outhouse as the bus came...

That's a far younger me on the front on the far side braving some rapids in West Virginia following graduation from undergrad. What a great time that was.

Debbie and I on our first (sort of) vacation together in Toronto, a number of years ago: