I found a site the other day which allows you to “tilt-shift” any photo. For those of you unfamiliar with tilt-shifting, it’s a photo manipulation technique which basically blurs the foreground and background of your photo and results in a “miniaturization” effect. It only really works on landscape type photos, but the effect is pretty nifty. For example, the picture below was taken from the the ski lift at Park City earlier this summer:

You can see the original picture here for comparison. And if you’d like to try this out on your own photos, you can visit the tiltshiftmaker here. Or if you’d just like to view all the crazy pictures other people have made, you can check out the flickr group here (beware that some of the pictures in that gallery didn’t work out so well).

Well, another year, another deer hunt. This year was unlike the past several years though because we didn’t come home with a deer. This was not due to a lack of deer availability, but a lack of being able to locate the one Ben shot. We assume that it wasn’t very badly hurt due to multiple factors, but regardless, it was able to completely evade us after having been shot. Ben felt a combination of anger and sorrow for how things worked out, but ultimately, there was nothing more we could do. We did have fun 4-wheelin’ and hiking around the mountain and just spending time outdoors watching nature though. Our annual hunting ritual always serves as an excellent bonding experience for the boys in our family and we mostly just enjoy spending the weekend together whether we actually get a deer or not. And it’s always fun to watch all the animals in their natural habitat. This year we saw around 100 deer, 5 or 6 moose, a few elk and even a bear and her cubs (luckily from a safe distance). It’s definitely awe inspiring to spend time in the great outdoors.

Anyway, here are a few pictures of our weekend to help inspire awe in you dear reader (especially the first few which were of me trying to kill the almost dead batteries in the camera).

So the twins turn 1 year old tomorrow. CRAZY!!! In honor of this occasion, Emily sent their picture into Good Things Utah so they could be on TV for their birthday. The slideshow below is the result.

My ulterior motive to this post is to try out Flickr’s slick new flash slideshow thingy. Hint: click on the little “X” icon thingy in the bottom right to make it full screen.

Enjoy.

Jack and Annie got some new hats.

So we had to show them off.

So… with all the pictures we’re beginning to collect over at Flickr, I thought I’d just set aside one post to be the official “Pictures” post dedicated specifically to our Flickr slideshow feed.

Because… you’re really only here for the pictures anyway, right?

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