Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Christmas Photos

For Christmas, Tyla and I packed up Elijah and headed off to Indiana. We had no idea what to expect flying with a six month old but he was incredible! He wasn’t completely silent but he was close, even sleeping through a couple of the landings. We couldn’t have asked for a better little traveler.

We spent a nice week with the family. Luke, Rachel and David came over for most of the time that we were there too. For the first time in my life, there was no big Martens family reunion at Christmas. It was a bummer but it was also nice to stay in one place for the whole trip instead of driving 4 hours to Illinois.

My camera was clicking away throughout the trip. This post includes a bunch of the photos, but I also took a lot of video. That hasn’t been edited together yet but stay tuned!

A lot of these photos were taken in low light. Our new lens did a good job, but even f/2.8 wasn’t enough. Post-processing in Lightroom helped a bit but we really need to invest in a good flash.

Private: Christmas Photos

If you head into the photo gallery and look at the Family photos that I posted on Dec 31, you’ll see a bit of what we did on our Christmas vacation.

I didn’t get a good picture or video of it, but David got an awesome toy. It’s a Transformers voice changing helmet. There is a microphone inside the helmet that makes you sound like Optimus Prime. And best of all, it fits adults too! When I saw it, it instantly went on my gift list!

After we plowed through David’s mountain of toys (including a yard of bubble gum from Uncle Tim and Aunt Chelsea), we headed out to Illinois for the annual Martens Family Christmas. I posted the video for that yesterday. It was wonderful to see the crew again.

Luke got a GPS for Christmas so we took David out to try some geocaching. I’ve never done it before so I’m happy to have a few caches under my belt. I don’t know that I’ll be jumping to do more of it soon, but I can see it being a good family or group activity, especially for a parent trying to get their child outside.

Dad hooked me up with some of his camera gear while I was home so I now have a proper flash and a neck strap with quick disconnect clips. Thanks Dad! I’ll have to do some learning to figure out the flash (it’s all manual), but there are a number of cases when it would have been handy. Speaking of the camera, we took our 10,000th picture with it on this trip and we’ve had it for exactly one year!

So head off to the gallery and enjoy some photos! Merry Christmas!