Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

We wish you the sweetest Christmas and blessed year 2008!

Here are Joonatan, Benjamin and Olivia, having a taste of gingerbread cookies.

you know...man, it's that time of the year again...man

yup... rumours circulate again, man... check this out, man....

We dragged ourselves back from the grandparents yesterday. The kids have all flu, except Benjamin has a regular flu and a stomach flu... ...fortunately it's been better today.

The weekend was nice, though. Sarita and I enjoyed Bryan Adams who performed a great show on Friday night in Espoo, and the kids enjoyed the time with Sarita's family. No pictures of the show... but in compensation here's Olivia playing some Chopin.

benjamin and the robbed five minutes

A photographer David Hobby is running a lighting 102 online course at Strobist.com, and every once in awhile he puts up a tutorial with some no-cost tricks to improve lighting in photographs. Today it's very restricted lights in film noir style. I don't know anything about making film noir, (except the noir refers to lots of black) and left the colors on the shot. But here's my go with course.

the biggest challenge was the mood of the model, but I used all my 6year experience in the three-in-one technique: threat-blackmail-bribery - and got him sitting still - but you can't buy a smile. That would be too cheap...

...but enough me blogging for now - I have to pass the computer to benjamin to watch dvd's as i promised...



***edit***
now that I got my computer back, I tuned down the saturation and got nearly black&white Sepia. I don't know which is better, but this is the result...

Benjamin reaches four

Like predicted in the previous post, Benjamin reached the highly regarded pole of four years. We had (and survived) nearly a dozen friends of his and grandma and granpa from sarita's family witnessing the day. The kids had a great time with MC Sarita, and Benjamin enjoyed himself as the man of the day. Here's a couple of shots