Skagit Valley Tulip Festival - Big Post

I must warn you, this is a very, very long blog post. It's mostly pictures, but there are a lot of them. Bear with me...I think it's worth it.

Anthony and I woke up early today, way before school (6am for me, 7am for him), and hit the road to go see the annual tulip festival up north. He only attends school half time, and school starts after lunch, so this was totally doable. The festival takes place basically an hour north of our house, so we had plenty of time to see the flowers, eat lunch and get back before school started.

I think this is the fourth time we've been. So we have some great shots to compare to when Anthony was a very little guy.

I have a bazillion pictures to go through, so I thought instead of posting all of those right now, I'd do a quick recap of previous years.

This was 2006, when Anthony was about 16 months old.

I went back to work in the summer of 2006, and all we had were weekends to go up to the Tulip Fest. Since the weekends at the festival are incredibly crazy (traffic backups to the highway and miles down the interstate), we decided we never wanted to do weekends visits of it ever again...too stressful! In 2007 and 2008, both Larry and I were working way too many hours to even consider taking an afternoon to go up north to spend leisure time with Anthony.

We didn't go again until 2009. But that year was fun because I started really learning about photography. I was using film, but felt rusty with it, so I had some digital backup, just in case. Thus, Anthony became my trusty little assistant.

Do you see him? :)

There were some fighter jets from NAS Whidbey flying over head when this shot was taken.

It's funny because all of those shots in 2009 weren't processed at all in Photoshop or any computer software. They were just developed and scanned at Costco or Kenmore Camera, and then I uploaded them. Most of the shots were taken with the old Minolta XG-M, and the square shots were taken with an old Agfa camera that is older than everyone reading this blog (early 1940s). Yes, it still works!  No batteries. No light meter. No lens coating. See below.

It's been a fun journey learning about photography and gradually getting better at it. In 2010, we went back and took more photos. This time around, I had my new, fancy schmancy DSLR camera, but I didn't quite understand how to process the photos digitally like I do now. The pictures still look nice, but I'm still learning. I also brought a film camera, my Nikon N6006.

Film shots (and all below)

My cross-processing slide film mess up (which turned out really interesting).

Finally, we went back this year, and I'll share a few photos before dumping a ton of them on you. We had a lot of fun and really, I just brought the one camera. I'm not done playing with film, but now that I know what I'm doing on the computer, I don't feel like I can do better with film than I can with digital.

My observations from this little exercise:

• My little boy has grown! Awwwww...
• Someone really, really needs a haircut. Anthony, too.
• I've gotten a lot better at photography. Whoa! If I can do it, so can you.
• We're having a ridiculously cold spring. I really miss the glowing yellow ball of hot plasma in the sky (a.k.a. the sun).
• I still love film but I'm learning I can live without it.

Thanks for sticking with this post. There are a ton more photos from today...I'll get to them soon!