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Happy Birthday to My Most Amazing Husband!

Feb
1
2011
February 1, 2011
By 37 Comments

My dear Nasim, I’ve been through many difficulties in my life and was at my wits’ end when I met you. From that point on I knew I found my soul, my strength and my true love. You have uplifted me to new emotional heights, given me hope and have been supporting me, my dreams for the past 5 years. Together with you we are raising two most amazing children God could give us. Thank you for being so giving, a very loving husband and a perfect father to Omar and Ozzy. I go to bed every night and wake up every morning thanking God for having you as my husband, my soul mate and my best friend. We love you very much and wish you to be healthy and happy. Like you say: Once healthy and happy, we can achieve other things by our own will.

Lola

Omar

Although your sons never have a perfect hair day, they are precious in every way :D

Ozzy

Love forever,

Lola, Omar and Ozzy.

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San Juan Mountains Trip Log – Part 1

Oct
7
2010
October 7, 2010
By 18 Comments

Now that I have just a little bit more time on my hands, I am able to go back and review some of the images that Lola and I snapped when we went for a road trip to San Juan Mountains of Colorado a couple of weeks ago. One thing for sure, it is hard to guess the exact time when the colors will be at their peak and when the leaves are going to fall, since it changes year after year. If the cold hits the mountains early, the leaves change colors early. Although Denver has been pretty warm this fall, I had no idea how warm or cold it would be in the mountains. So without much thinking and guessing, Lola and I quickly packed our gear and took off to see the San Juan County. Our objective was to see Ouray, Telluride and the surrounding areas, test the Nikon 85mm f/1.4G, Nikon 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6G VR and Nikon 55-300mm f/4.5-5.6G DX VR lenses and come back with good pictures. I think we managed to snap a couple of good images, although the weather yet again did not cooperate much with us.

I hate to admit it, but this was my first time travelling to that part of Colorado – I have been living here for over 13 years! Everybody kept telling me to visit the “Switzerland of America”, but various circumstances and other travel plans have been putting off my trip year after year. This year has been super busy for Lola and I, for which we are certainly grateful, but at the same time, it left very little time for personal and family travel. But there is a big difference between a photography trip and a family trip. We knew that our kids would not enjoy it, so with promises to take them to Micky later this year, we took off.

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What got you into Photography?

Mar
21
2010
March 21, 2010
By 25 Comments

Everybody has a story on why they got into photography and what event contributed to purchasing their first film or digital SLR camera. In my case, the decision was based solely on one picture that my wife sent me via Google Talk while I was at work – the picture of Omar in a cradle swing. When Omar was a few months old, Lola decided to take a picture of Omar on a very old Sony point and shoot camera that I had back from 2002. As with any other point and shoot that I had before then, I never knew anything about taking good pictures – I just pointed at a subject and took a picture without worrying about camera settings, ISO, aperture, shutter speed and other photography lingo that I had no clue about.

Here is the picture that started my journey into photography:

Blurry picture of Omar

I remember the day when I received it. Lola said that Omar started to smile and it was her attempt to capture the moment. It drove me nuts that such a beautiful picture turned out to be so blurry and we both agreed that we desperately needed a professional camera to capture those kinds of moments. Little did we know back then that it was the light and our technique, not the camera, that caused the above image to be blurry :)

Long story short, I came home and after a couple of hours of research, bought our first DSLR – Nikon D80 kit with an 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 lens.

So, what is your story and what got you started in photography?

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Nostalgique

Feb
27
2010
February 27, 2010
By 16 Comments

At times when my husband is away on a business trip or any trip whatsoever, I get so nostalgic, I start flipping the “pages” of Lightroom to glace over our old images. Oh, I do own those old style coffee table albums, too. If the technology keeps up the way it has been, I will soon forget which shelf is generously occupied by my albums. Instead of thinking or speaking out loud, which I do a lot, I decided to write my thoughts out loud. I am not sure if there is such a thing. If there is not, I hope people list “writing out loud” under my name in Wikipedia.

So, my husband is away for couple of more days. I am stuck home with my little dudes with no wallet or my phone! All my husband’s fault! Which means all I get to do is cook, watch TV, attend to my boy’s needs and get nostalgic of how my husband would play with the boys every night to give me a time off. Right about when I finished the last sentence, my younger son Osman, who is still not sleeping at 11:34PM is calling for his dad! Awwwwwwww, we miss you daddy-o, come back!

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Curtains and Life

Jan
23
2010
January 23, 2010
By 7 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about getting new curtains for our apartment. There was a lot of work involved in hanging the curtains. Since the ceilings were too high for me, my husband did the entire job by himself. I ironed the curtains though! Just as I hoped that we were all done, my mom told me that we did a lousy job assigning curtains to each window. As a matter of fact, it looks like there is more work ahead of me…

Each set of curtains came with clear instructions. Well, I have the curtains but I lost the instructions. A girl does not need any instructions, I said to myself. At least that’s what I initially thought. As you see, I am still on a big mission and God only knows when it is going to end!

Here is the current look of my little nook I created for myself. I admit that it looks a little different right about now! It might look even more different a week from now.

Curtains

Aside from not feeling very well for the last week and not being able to go out as much, we are trying to keep our sons busy and entertained. We added one more lesson to our routine daily exercises. In addition to book reading, phonics, drawing, watching cartoons and playing games – Omar is learning to write. He is doing pretty good, I shall admit. Well, he is no genius (at least not yet) but he is mommy’s little smartie pants!.. and he needs a haircut.

Omar

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Big website changes

Jan
20
2010
January 20, 2010
By 8 Comments

During the last two weeks, I have been heavily working on the website, making big changes to the site layout/design, content and sections. I had no idea that the database I was running on before was so problematic…apparently I have been running it on a wrong character set all this time! It took me a while to convert the website content to the UTF8 standard encoding and even now I’m continuing to experience some problems with weird characters showing up in some posts, so please let me know if you see a bunch of weird characters showing up and I will take care of them.

On top of that, I decided to get rid of the “www” in front of our domain. I have always been using “www” in front of all of my domains and this year I changed my mind and decided to make the domain shorter. It was a painful decision, because it will affect search engine links and rankings, whether I like it or not.

I also decided to get rid of the old gallery and start over with a brand new one. Instead of putting junk into the gallery like I was doing before, I will only be uploading the best pictures that are worth staying in the gallery. Initially, I was going to reuse the same gallery software, but I decided to try a new one this time, which should be more integrated to our blog. So far, I like the results and I will be posting the first gallery in a couple of days, if everything works out as planned.

I’m sure you have already noticed the top of the main page where it says “Last Two Recipes from Lola”. It took me a while to figure it all out and I had to write custom code for that, but the top part will now automatically pull the latest two recipe images from Lola’s Recipes page. She has been busy with other projects lately, but promised to put up more recipes very soon!

Oh, and the new Nikon 70-200mm VR II is soo good!

Osman pointing at model airplane

Lola took this shot wide open at f/2.8, 1/5000th of a second. Simply incredible, one of the Nikon’s sharpest lenses ever!

Nikon 70-200mm VR II 100% Crop

Nikon 70-200mm VR II 100% Crop

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Where are my curtains?

Jan
7
2010
January 7, 2010
By 13 Comments

My thoughts leading to hang new curtains in our small apartment led me to write this random post. We have postponed curtain hanging for a long time, thinking that we would be moving to a new place. Shortly after, we will. Truthfully speaking, I am so attached to this place and less likely would want to move. So, I begged Nasim to give me this opportunity to see my curtains hanging, which are tailored specifically for this apartment. My husband agreed to help me hang them and decorate our little bird nest!

As I was getting ready to drop an emotional “look-I-am-so-happy” entry in our blog, I searched the computer for the “before” images of our apartment. I ended up looking through the pictures of 2006, which by the way, are all point and shoot camera images. As I was looking at them, memories gushed through my brain with simple, but very pleasant moments. I did pick one picture of our living room, but decided to choose some more images to portray the beginning of my journey that started back in 2006.

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Omar and Osman – Latest Pics

Jan
5
2010
January 5, 2010
By 11 Comments

It’s been a while since I last posted a picture of our two boys. This picture was taken about three weeks ago at a local park. We went out for a short hike on a snowy road and the kids enjoyed it, even though it was pretty cold!

Osman and Omar

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Random thoughts and shots

Oct
12
2009
October 12, 2009
By 1 Comment

As much as autumn is a beautiful season I discovered that I do not like it as much as other seasons. For some reason this gloominess undoubtedly tries to become a part of my mood. If not for my family and photography, which always brings extra energy, I think I would probably go bonkers. Here are some random shots that my husband and I took recently. Some of them are from the photo walk we did couple of weeks back. Some were taken during summer, and some are just nice coincidences. There is nothing like seeing a warm, smiling face when you are in one of those autumn-y weather! Except the first couple of shots… My son was so upset, even going to his favorite Thai place didn’t help much :)

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Just like that…

Sep
30
2009
September 30, 2009
By 2 Comments
Flowers #1

Just like that...

We decided to go for a walk and photograph fall colors in our neighborhood. We also promised Omar that we would take him to “Chuck e Cheese” afterward. Nasim called and said that he was leaving work. I got children ready and almost got myself ready (which happens rarely) waiting for my husband to come from work. Kids and I waited for good 30 minutes. It usually takes Nasim around 10 minutes to drive home from work. 30 minutes got me worried and I called him a couple of times. The last time I called, he said that he was sorta stuck in traffic.

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