Why bother?

Sometimes San asks me why I bother to sit with Photoshop on some pictures..

See the original of this photo here..

Do you see that "Kebab me haddi" in the background? Well, he happened to be a nice guy, but as far as this picture was concerned he was an unwanted artifact. It was freezing out there, what with the glacier on one side and high speed winds on the other side. My subjects were literally 4 feet away and my zoom was at 17mm  to get them and the scenery in the frame. Simply could not get an angle where I could cut out the nice gentleman but my wife and daughter were flashing smiles at me and it would be criminal negligence if I did not click away!

Photoshop comes to the rescue. See the final picture!

Using the texture of the mountain and floating ice on another part of the picture, cleaned him out of the frame. On the one hand, yes! it is photo manipulation but on the one hand, I have something worth putting in our album!

Thank you Adobe for giving me the wisdom to know that we can always change things in "post-production"!

Those few moments..

Jr. and the little one are fighting by default. We do know that when we are not looking and when left to themselves in their room, they play for hours and are all "love and caring".. it is almost as though they put on a deliberate act when we are around..

These photographs were taken when they were both playing in the local park this weekend!

Kids, gotcha! 

Now be like this more often..

Flying by Denali

We are an equal opportunity family, at least when blog photos are concerned.

The last post saw the little one all happy to be airborne. This one has Jr. aka style missy on the plane.

We spent a wonderful two days at the Grande Denali Lodge which was an architectural marvel in itself. It is on a hill and the windy gravel road that leads up to it is apparently the third highest road in Alaska (or close to it)!

The views from the hotel were spectacular and the service was great. The kids loved the place. There were pick up services for the air taxi and to other places there from the hotel door which was great! 

If the views from the lobby and rooms were great, the views on the Fly Denali plane were mind blowing!

Here are the last few shots taken as we flew back from seeing Denali mountain up close towards Haley.

If you are going with small kids on this 8 seater plane.. remember this! There is NO restroom on an 8 seater plane. You get a bucket. The sight of the bucket is enough to deter any kid from thinking about going.. The bucket officially beats "think of daisies" as the pee pee restrainer!

That one looks hazy but the large size image shows up much better than this compressed jpg on this website.. 

On our way back the sun did his magic by giving us some special effects. We were going through clouds and that helped!

Have not gotten around to editing the images from the ground trip through the National park by bus.. 

On this trip we travelled by plane, boat, bus, car... bike, horse and dog-sled were other options, but the Homestead tour where we get to see the sled dogs being trained was vetoed against the better wishes of Jr. and the little one.. we know how it goes. . . first it is a request to see huskie puppies and before you know it the puppy lobby in the house has a major advantage and we are back to discussing why we will not have dogs in the house!

Next, bus tour pictures..