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so we’ve been busy the last couple weeks…decided to move into adulthood and made our first home purchase along with some other interesting things…thanks to everyone for the help getting it cleaned up and painted.
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as much as we loved the fuax curtain wallpaper trim, it just wasn’t working.
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yea, it’s that pink…even the ceiling.
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they updated the stove and fridge which was nice
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our bedroom was a light tan, almost grey…we changed it to ‘almond’ which goes with the shades already there. score!
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our bed for a few nights……i swear, her face always looks the same like it’s just rotated into position hahhahaha
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wan’s going to make us a mantle…i’m liking his ideas so far too.
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and the backyard…
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housewarming gift from kelvin, aka ass, aka bro-in-law…real funny
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first rice cooker i’ve ever had (another gift lol)
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i liked this pic…the chinese place near us never had a bean curd szechuan style request before so they hooked it up with a quart full of tofu!
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we found this in front of some guy’s house and grabbed it for free. more updates on it after the weekend…
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we got tons of stuff from my sis, michele’s fam, and friends…like this ikea coffee table, just a little wood glue and it’s g2g!
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that’s all for now! i wanted to post a pic-a-day to help with the camera experience, so this’ll be an introduction =)
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oh and one more thing =D
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now back to work since george is coming next!
the holidays gave us a lot of different challenges with getting shots in the right light, focus, composition, and just general picture taking. most of the pics we took ended up being very mundane and can easily be done with a point & shoot, but it was definitely a learning experience. i found myself hitting up digital-photography-school.com before each occasion to get last minute tips to make the best out of our time…i had to resize for the blog and wordpress blands out the pics so check out the flickr for original format and full-size. it would prob be better to let you click the pic for the full size. note to self!
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christmas eve in staten island was truly a night i will never forget. so much food, so much family, and so much fun.
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the new addition with mom…
with gramps
and with great gramps!
santa even stopped by!
christmas day we spent at my house, there was snow on the ground and i wanted to go out, but never had a chance…
for the first time in my life, i found myself not opening gifts christmas morning and taking pics of my parents opening. hahahaha…
my dad’s such an easy present…
time to start cooking!
and another new addition! this was one of my favorite pics…
sisters
all the kids got my grandma a necklace with each one of their birthstones…
christopher, always goin for the soda!
definitely can’t wait for a wide angle, which will be our second purchase after a flash.
cleanup time!
off to michele’s fam!
so much wasted space to the right
more good food
cupcakes from crumbs in nyc
i like this picture
we have to work on focusing on more than one subject. up the aperture or manual focus? hmmm….
most comfortable position. ever.
went to see the tree in nyc, this proved to be the greatest challenge and sadly turned out the worst pics of the holidays. after reading about using the tungsten setting, i saw how much it really brought out the lights, but with our stock flash and inexperience, we just couldn’t get faces to look natural. we ended up switching to auto so the pics are usable and some post-processing would help, but next year…we will be ready!
almost got it =(
we then went to my sis’ a couple days after christmas…finally get my gifts!
the king in his thrown…
yummy dessert time!
i setup the camera to take pics in one minute intervals, it worked out for some nice candid shots and definitely made gift opening less stressful letting me focus on family time…
we all got moms the beatles collection. very cool i must say…
some post-processing will really make these look much better…
white balance was off.
cheerio!
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new years pics coming up!!
pulled from yahoo
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Guitar legend-inventor Les Paul dies at age 94
AP, Aug 13, 2009 11:56 am PDT
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Les Paul, who invented the solid-body electric guitar later wielded by a legion of rock ‘n’ roll greats, died Thursday of complications from pneumonia. He was 94.According to Gibson Guitar, Paul died at White Plains Hospital. His family and friends were by his side.
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As an inventor, Paul also helped bring about the rise of rock ‘n’ roll with multitrack recording, which enables artists to record different instruments at different times, sing harmony with themselves, and then carefully balance the tracks in the finished recording.
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The use of electric guitar gained popularity in the mid-to-late 1940s, and then exploded with the advent of rock in the mid-’50s.
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“Suddenly, it was recognized that power was a very important part of music,” Paul once said. “To have the dynamics, to have the way of expressing yourself beyond the normal limits of an unamplified instrument, was incredible. Today a guy wouldn’t think of singing a song on a stage without a microphone and a sound system.”
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A tinkerer and musician since childhood, he experimented with guitar amplification for years before coming up in 1941 with what he called “The Log,” a four-by-four piece of wood strung with steel strings.
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“I went into a nightclub and played it. Of course, everybody had me labeled as a nut.” He later put the wooden wings onto the body to give it a tradition guitar shape.
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In 1952, Gibson Guitars began production on the Les Paul guitar.
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Pete Townsend of the Who, Steve Howe of Yes, jazz great Al DiMeola and Led Zeppelin‘s Jimmy Page all made the Gibson Les Paul their trademark six-string.
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Over the years, the Les Paul series has become one of the most widely used guitars in the music industry. In 2005, Christie’s auction house sold a 1955 Gibson Les Paul for $45,600.
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In the late 1960s, Paul retired from music to concentrate on his inventions. His interest in country music was rekindled in the mid-’70s and he teamed up with Chet Atkins for two albums. The duo were awarded a Grammy for best country instrumental performance of 1976 for their “Chester and Lester” album.
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With Mary Ford, his wife from 1949 to 1962, he earned 36 gold records for hits including “Vaya Con Dios” and “How High the Moon,” which both hit No. 1. Many of their songs used overdubbing techniques that Paul had helped develop.
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“I could take my Mary and make her three, six, nine, 12, as many voices as I wished,” he recalled. “This is quite an asset.” The overdubbing technique was highly influential on later recording artists such as the Carpenters.
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Released in 2005, “Les Paul & Friends: American Made, World Played” was his first album of new material since those 1970s recordings. Among those playing with him: Peter Frampton, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Richie Sambora.
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“They’re not only my friends, but they’re great players,” Paul told The Associated Press. “I never stop being amazed by all the different ways of playing the guitar and making it deliver a message.”
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Two cuts from the album won Grammys, “Caravan” for best pop instrumental performance and “69 Freedom Special” for best rock instrumental performance. (He had also been awarded a technical Grammy in 2001.)
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Paul was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005.
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Paul was born Lester William Polfus, in Waukseha, Wis., on June 9, 1915. He began his career as a musician, billing himself as Red Hot Red or Rhubarb Red. He toured with the popular Chicago band Rube Tronson and His Texas Cowboys and led the house band on WJJD radio in Chicago.
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In the mid-1930s he joined Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians and soon moved to New York to form the Les Paul Trio, with Jim Atkins and bassist Ernie Newton.
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Meanwhile, he had made his first attempt at audio amplification at age 13. Unhappy with the amount of volume produced by his acoustic guitar, Paul tried placing a telephone receiver under the strings. Although this worked to some extent, only two strings were amplified and the volume level was still too low.
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By placing a phonograph needle in the guitar, all six strings were amplified, which proved to be much louder. Paul was playing a working prototype of the electric guitar in 1929.
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His work on taping techniques began in the years after World War II, when Bing Crosby gave him a tape recorder. Drawing on his earlier experimentation with his homemade record-cutting machines, Paul added an additional playback head to the recorder. The result was a delayed effect that became known as tape echo.
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Tape echo gave the recording a more “live” feel and enabled the user to simulate different playing environments.
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Paul’s next “crazy idea” was to stack together eight mono tape machines and send their outputs to one piece of tape, stacking the recording heads on top of each other. The resulting machine served as the forerunner to today’s multitrack recorders.
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In 1954, Paul commissioned Ampex to build the first eight-track tape recorder, later known as “Sel-Sync,” in which a recording head could simultaneously record a new track and play back previous ones.
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He had met Ford, then known as Colleen Summers, in the 1940s while working as a studio musician in Los Angeles. For seven years in the 1950s, Paul and Ford broadcast a TV show from their home in Mahwah, N.J. Ford died in 1977, 15 years after they divorced.
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In recent years, even after his illness in early 2006, Paul played Monday nights at New York night spots. Such stars as Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, Dire Straits‘ Mark Knopfler, Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Van Halen came to pay tribute and sit in with him.
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“It’s where we were the happiest, in a `joint,’” he said in a 2000 interview with the AP. “It was not being on top. The fun was getting there, not staying there — that’s hard work.”
