New SLR for Father's Day

I can't put into words how wonderful my husband is. He's crazy about being a daddy and our boys just adore him. He leads our family well. He looks to God as his source of strength and I am forever grateful for the blessing he is in our lives.

We've considered an SLR camera for a while now. You might remember some of the fantastic photos taken of our boys by our favorite photographer, Heidi. She and her family lived four houses away from us in WI. She came over to take Micah's "newborn" photos after he came home from the NICU. We couldn't take him to a studio due to his CHF (congestive heart failure). So our baby gift from Heidi was a session in our home. And then there were Matthew's newborn pics (that I never posted to MY blog, but you can link to them on Heidi's blog... just go down a few entries).

Anyway... Heidi got a new backup camera and sold us her only-slightly-used backup camera, a Canon EOS 40D. Holy cow! We took some photos with it at the park last night and just on auto mode during dusk (no flash), we could not believe how amazing the pictures are. I reduced the resolution tremendously to post them here, but I think you'll still be impressed.  And this is without any sort of editing, except to reduce the size of the image.

This sand doesn't taste as good as I thought it would...

Just for kicks, here are a couple of videos too.  The first one is a bit over a minute.  Make sure you watch Matthew's landing after he slides down.  The second is very brief.  You might need to replay it to catch the kiss at the beginning (it's only 3 seconds long).  I recommend double-clicking on the video arrow to open a new browser page with youtube because wide-screen doesn't seem to work well when embedded.