Up, Up and Away

Sorry for the lack of blog posts but we have been away. By means of a 737 (and not a bunch of balloons) we flew to Florida to celebrate my son's third birthday at the happiest place on earth. What a blast! I won't bore you with the family snapshots (although, if you're interested I'll post them on Maxaroni (and Cheese)) later today, but while we were there I took the boy out to Disney's Boardwalk to toy with an idea for his birthday pictures.

As these things tend to go, my idea did not work out exactly as I had planned, but I am still IN LOVE with this first picture, and my back up plan saved the day for the rest. I am having dreams of a canvas wall over my fireplace now....

And in case you're wondering how I got so lucky to have the Boardwalk all to myself, the truth is, I didn't. That is one of the kinks that got thrown in my grand plan. There were a lot of people there! I'm not sure why this didn't occur to me before. In my head, Max and I were leisurely taking pictures on an empty Boardwalk filled with late afternoon sun, with blue sky stretching out beyond him. In reality, the Boardwalk is curved, so the blue sky was hidden behind buildings, and there were people everywhere.

Here's a secret. The first picture is doctored. I used three different pictures to make it appear that there was no one else around. Check out the original below (you can also see what it looks like straight out of the camera without the vintage processing), and the final edit again. Pretty cool, right?

I'm not saying photoshop should fix everything. Ideally, you can get the shot without having to doctor it later, but in this case, I'm glad I was able to save this one with a little digital magic!

I'll be back soon with a few more disney shots. Fireworks! Oooh! Aaaah!