Movin' On Up...

So Molly's about 2 1/2 now, and we decided it was about time to get her out of the crib. We've heard horror stories about kids falling out of bed, not adjusting, up every 10 minutes for hours, etc., so we've been stressing over it for weeks. We were going to just pull her crib and get her a little twin bed, but she's been using fiberboard hand-me-down furniture for the whole time she's been here (and Kelly went into a furniture store kids' section ), so we decided to take the plunge and get her a whole new bedroom suite.

We didn't take her with when we went to get her 'big girl bed', and you should have seen the look on her face when we walked in and we weren't carrying a new mattress. Just this total excitement changing to a look of utter, crestfallen dispair; "You didn't get my big-girl-bed!" Well it was on order and took a couple weeks to get in.

So then just by happenstance she was off visiting the grandparents for a few days when it did come in, so we had the chance to really fix up her room and get everything settled in while she wasn't here. So we brought her home and she got to see her whole new room all put together. She went absolutely nuts, and loves being in her room; she's constantly asking us if we want to go play up in her room with her. I got some cool flower and butterfly appliques, so we didn't have to re-paint but her room still looks totally different. Anyway, she slept about half the night the first night in her room, then woke up and wanted to come in with us (which is pretty normal, since she had been away for a few days and just missed us). After that first night she's slept all night in her big-girl-bed every night, with no rails or anything else. We got a little pink step-stool so she can climb up in there on her own, and oh boy that is the coolest thing ever for her. She takes great pride in getting into bed and under the covers on her own now.

So thank goodness, another milestone passed with much less stress than we had worried about.


Some photos...

A few new tank shots, in preparation for the book Kelly and I are writing about aquarium photography...

WS1_9539May_26-_2007-2

WS1_9539May_26-_2007-2, originally uploaded by whitesharkphoto.

Just a super-quick shot from this past Saturday's wedding. Going to try to keep posting more photos more quickly, so more to come! :-)

"Braveheart" (or...Molly versus Blue Crayola Marker)

Molly: 0

Crayola: 1

Holy hell, has it really been since March that I've posted on the blog?!?! Ugh, I am such a slacker. Okay, not entirely true. I'm not a slacker at all, just a blog-slacker. As always, my deepest and most humble apologies to those of you out there (all three of you...har-har-har) that keep coming back here hoping for new posts.

Let me try to bring you up to speed on the goings-on in the Wikman household and business.

• The main reason why I've been such a one-off with the blog lately (lately?! It's been months, man. That kind of surpasses 'lately'!) is because of classes. I was taking a somewhat lighter load this semester, which now I'm very thankful for. The first half of the semester went really well, really smooth, really...light. I should have known! The second half of the semester was all projects. For the last month I've been sleeping between 3 and 5 hours a night, and have been stressed to the point of...well I don't know how to finish that analogy. Let's just say I've been pretty frazzled. Kelly and Molly and Grandma have been absolute saints for putting up with me and my stresses. But as with most things in life, it all worked out for the best in the end. I have a new nickname...'dean'. Why?! Because that's the list I'm on... Yeahhhhh, straight A's once again! Woo-hooo!!

• Molly continues to grow like a weed. She's about 2 1/2 now and is staggeringly smart. She makes connections and intuits things that I don't even get. Truly amazing little child. A quick snap of 'my girls' at Easter a few weeks ago...

• Hockey season has also been keeping us very busy. The Ice finished the year on an incredible run, powering through the last couple games of the regular season and the first couple rounds of the Clark Cup playoffs. Kelly had the chance the travel with the team to Cedar Rapids, Iowa for one of the games in the second round of the playoffs. She had a focus motor in her main lens go bad, and was pretty worried that none of her shots had come out. Uhhhh, sure Kel, whatever you say...
  
  
  She did those focusing a 200mm lens manually. For those of you that don't know a ton about photography, that is simply amazing! And almost all of her shots came out. My wife rocks.
  
  Unfortunately, the Ice lost in the first game of the final-four of the USHL championships yesterday afternoon. The guys did an outstanding job this year, and Kelly and I couldn't be more proud of them.

• Now that things are starting to wind down with no classes and no hockey, they're starting to wind up with weddings. We kicked off our 'season' last night with Amy and Craig, who had their wedding in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, about an hour and a half from Indy. I'm still sitting in the hotel at the moment, propped up on the couch and waiting for Kelly to wake up (I'm still stuck in that rut of needing very little sleep, so I'm usually up by 5 or 6 no matter what, with only the big bags under my eyes to tell the tale!), so I haven't gotten a chance to see the photos on a big monitor yet. But I can't wait!!! Scanning through some of them on the cameras' LCDs last night has me itching to see what we got!!

Really that's about it, I think. I know it doesn't seem like much, and I know there's stuff I'm forgetting (because I haven't had my requisite large-coffee-six-sugars yet this morning), so hopefully I'll get off my duff and keep the blog a LOT more updated as summer progresses.

And if I don't. Email me at john at whitesharkphoto dot com (I spelled it out so junk mailers won't harvest the address) to remind me!! :-)

**** Warning: No photos, but some icky descriptions below... *********









Okay, I warned you!!
As you may or may not know, Kelly and I are both avid soccer players. We play indoor three nights a week year-round and outdoor whenever the weather's above freezing.

Last night in our indoor match, the opposing keeper went out to clear the ball. Kicked with his right foot and then somehow planted on that foot as well. Foot slipped, knee hyperextended. He was on the ground screaming for awhile. I've been there, that's no fun. Knee swells up like a water balloon. They carried him off and got him some ice.

That was the first half. 2nd half starts and about 5 min in I'm in goal (I'm a keeper), their player is dribbling down towards me. Our defender is right with him, they're jockeying for the ball. Ball squirts free and out of the corner of my eye (I'm watching the ball move away from that play) I see their feet get tangled up. Our guy falls over sideways and rolls. Their guy stumbles and falls backwards...with his foot underneath him. Everybody on the field heard it...sounded like a baseball bat wrapped in a wet towel as his leg snapped. Broke it completely, looked like right above the right ankle. He rolls over onto his stomach screaming this horrible high-pitched wail, and he's got his knee bent so that his foot is up in the air. At first I didn't notice it, but then when I looked I realized that his foot was kind of off to the side of his leg and not pointing the right direction any more. BLEAH!!!!!

So the remainder of our game was pretty much cancelled while we waited for the paramedics to come take care of him. Kelly used to be an EMT, so she stayed with the poor guy and held his hand and helped keep his leg steady until the medicos got there.

The team that played after that needed a keeper, so I stayed for an extra match. Good match, lots of fun.

Following that another match started. I was taking off my shinguards and talking to some of my buddies from the other team and watching the new game start. Girl on one of the teams goes into the corner after the ball, keeper comes out to clear it away, they get tangled up. Heard the pop of her ACL blowing from 30 feet away. She's laying on the ground screaming. I had to get home, so didn't wait around to see the paramedics come back for that one.

Mind you, this is an over-30 recreational league. We all know each other and for the most part play really low-key. We're all just out there to get some exercise. It's been probably five years since I"ve seen a serious injury at this place, and now three in one night, all just freak injuries that could happen at any time! Good grief!!!

Hmm, just realized I killed my photo when I did some massive updates to our main website. Have to check that out...

:)

Well, we survived the big snowstorm of ought-seven. From watching the weather guys on TV, you'd think it was the end of time or something. Hello! We got about 10" of snow over the course of two weeks. OooooooooOOOooo!!! I remember when I was a kid we'd get that kind of snow in a day!
Anyway, it was still fun to be home with Molly and playing in the snow. She was visiting her grandparents in southern Indiana for a lot of that time, but still made it home for some of the snow. She loves to make " 'now angels", but needs some help waving her arms and legs.
We've been spending these slow weeks finishing up some projects around the house, letting Molly do a lot of fingerpainting, working on some album-design projects for Whiteshark, and preparing a new re-design of our website. Look for that to roll out (hopefully) in a few weeks.
In the meantime, here are a few recent photos...

Some people like the holiday season, some people like to season their steaks. We prefer hockey season!!

GO COLTS!!!!

Because I'm sure Payton Manning has nothing better to do than read our blog, we just wanted to congratulate our Indianapolis Colts on bringing the first major sports championship to Indiana!!

Couple of photos of the new stadium (Lucas Oil Arena) that I did yesterday...

So it's been another couple weeks since I've written anything, and mostly it's been a pretty uneventful time. It was freakishly warm for quite awhile, but then winter seemed to drop in with a vengence here in Indy. It hasn't cracked 20* F for days, and we finally got a decent snowfall a couple days ago.

Here's a photo of Molly all bundled up and ready to go outside when it was about 3* F. She'd been cooped up in the house for quite awhile and all she wanted to do was "Go o'tide! Da-da, go o'tide!!" So 20 minutes of layering later she was ready to go make snow angels! :-)

Now those of you that know me know that I love everything about cars and auto racing...so long as they turn in a direction other-than-or-in-addition-to left. In other words, I'm not a big NASCAR or Indycar fan at all. From March until October I practically breathe Formula One, but I just don't get the thrill of turning left all the time. Still, it was pretty cool to meet and hang out with Tony Stewart at the Ice game last night!! He grew up about 30 miles south of where we live, and comes out to an Ice game every year as a promotional event for the Tony Stewart Foundation. He came out to the Ice game to 'help coach' for the evening.

Kel and I got to photograph him as he signed autographs at the season ticket holder party before the game and then in the locker room before and after the game. We got free sweatshirts from the Ice, which Tony signed for us. Kel got her sweatshirt signed in the locker room after the game. She was joking around with Tony and saying she hoped she didn't take too many photos of him tonight, and he gave it right back to her, saying that at least he had somebody good looking taking the pictures tonight.

Oh wow, so has it really been since Thanksgiving since I've posted to the blog?! Jeez, I'm sure everyone has given us up for lost!!! My deepest and most humble apologies. Maybe if I could get Kel to post once in awhile too... I'm sure she has stuff to say!

But for now, suffice it to say that we've had our usual busy time around here. My fall semester classes ended just before Christmas. Missed Dean's List by a single B in my microcontrollers class. Argh!!! I know that all As and a B is pretty good, but I really wanted Dean's List again. Ahh well, a new crop of classes is starting next week, so I'll get my chance again I guess.

Molly had a great Christmas. She pretty much understood what was going on. "Molly, who's coming next week?" "Tan-ta!" "That's right, and what's Santa going to bring you?" "Pwesents!" Heh. She's off visiting my folks this week because we've got soccer tonight and a couple hockey games to cover, plus a wedding this weekend. It's good to be able to get so much work done, and we're so grateful to have grandparents that are always so willing to help, but man do we miss her!!

Speaking of hockey, the season is going great! Both Kel and I are getting better and better at shooting while avoiding flying sticks, pucks, and knocked-out teeth. We also had the opportunity to shoot the 2007 calendar for the Chill Girls, the Ice cheerleading squad. That was...ahem...fun. :) I know, I know, get some photos up. I'll be working on that over the next day or two. I'm finally caught up on updating our website for '07, processing weddings, and cleaning the house, so now I can finally do some more of the 'fun' stuff in these last few days before I head back into the world of operating system architecture and Visual Basic.

So yeah, my New Year's resolution is to do a much better job at keeping the blog updated and keeping everyone informed of the minutae of our daily life and times! :-)

Best wishes to everyone in this new year, may it be prosperous and kind to you all!!

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Just wanted to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving and bring you up to speed on our apparent absence from our blog lately. I wish I had a really cool excuse like we've been backpacking across Europe or diving in Fiji or something, but unfortunately our excuse is the usual mundanaity (is that even a word?!) of life in central Indiana. Don't get me wrong, that's not a bad thing...in fact it's been keeping us quite busy!!

We're finally seeing our way through the end of 'wedding season'. Only two more left in '06. We're really looking forward to these last two, but at the same time it feels so freakin' nice to have a Saturday off!! It was odd, though; last Saturday was our first off since somewhere back in early summer. Kel and I kept looking at each other and asking Are you sure we don't have a wedding today?!

We've been meeting with some great couples for 2007 weddings, and dates are starting to fill up! I don't mean that to sound like pressure if you're a couple looking for a photographer, but...oh who I am I kidding, of course it is! ;-) Seriously though, the prime dates in 07 are starting to fill!

In other news, Molly's two now. Holy cow time flies!! Here's one of her two-year photos...


Kel and I were talking today after the usual turkey gluttony, and remembering back to when she was born. After a long labor, Molly was tired and had trouble clearing the amniotic fluid from her lungs. Everything about that first night has kind of a haze over it now in my mind from the exhaustion and stress, so it's actually a little surreal to think that she almost didn't make it through her first night. She spent a week in the NICU, and Kelly and I had our Thanksgiving dinner in the hospital cafeteria. Now it's two years later and she's in the 98th percentile for height and the 50th for weight, and is as healthy and precocious as any preschooler (holy hell, that's scary in itself!!) I've seen. She had a great birthday--Kel made her a duck-shaped cake and she had a blast opening all her presents (already can't wait until Christmas!).

In other Whiteshark news, we're now offering photo viewing and print sales of events through our main website. Be sure to check it out! :) We're also offering all new options for albums in 2007, so look for more to come on that!

WHEW, I think that just about brings everything up to speed. I think. It's been a long day of cooking and eating and watching Curious George (Molly just has to watch George at least three times a day). I'm beat. But I'm installing album creation software on the computer, so I kind of want to play around with that a bit yet too.

Jessica & John...

Oh my, what a wedding! We just delivered their album last night, so we got to remind ourselves of just how much fun this day was. Their reception was one of the biggest all-out parties we've been to. There was dancing, there was laughing, there was pantsless dancing, there was more laughing! Great couple, great time, that's all I've got to say!

Teresa & Gary...

Two of the absolute nicest people you could ever want to meet. We had such a fun time at their wedding! Funny thing is...we didn't realize until we were at the wedding that they live just down the street from us in the next subdivision over!

Jamie & Matt...

You know, sometimes I wonder if I sound like a broken record when I keep posting 'great wedding'. Naaaaahhhhh!! Once again, we had a blast and got some fantastic photos. This was our second trip to this venue, and we love shooting there. Jamie & Matt had originally planned for this wedding to be outside, but they did a great job of rolling with the punches when it poured for pretty much the entire day. The wedding was inside and went off without a hitch!

Am I a Geek?

I think I can safely say that the answer to that is a resounding YES!! So we've been kicking around the idea of upgrading our main computer system in preparation for the next generation of Windows coming out (I've been running Vista RC-1 on my laptop for a few weeks now). Fry's had a good sale, and we decided to jump on it. So I'm talking with the salesguy, and he's hounding me and hounding me about the extended warranty program, and how it protects against this and that and it's really a great deal. I told him no at least three times. He actually started getting kind of pissy with me because I wasn't going to "take advantage of this great deal". Finally I told him, "Look, in two hours I'll have voided pretty much every warranty this thing has. I'm going to take it home, change out the power supply, add two more hard drives to it, change the video card, repartition the C:\ drive, and install a beta-level operating system." His response, "oh." It's like look, skippy, I'm in IT, I know what the heck I'm doing, and I know the guts of a computer probably as well as you do.

I love talking with other computer guys, whether I'm buying a system or component or just out shooting the bull, but what bugs the snot out of me more than anything is when someone won't take no for an answer. Telemarketers are another example. I know they're just doing a job, and I can respect that; everybody's got to earn a living. So I don't get rude or angry with them. As soon as I answer the phone and I realize it's a telemarketer, I just ask them to hang on a second, and put the phone down...for five or ten minutes. They get their bonus for keeping a caller for umpteen minutes, and I don't have to listen to them. When I hear the wa-wa-wa of the busy signal when the line goes dead, I hang it up. :-)

Kelly & Brandon...

Finally getting dug out of backlog of work I've had built up, and am loving getting back into looking through and editing photos again. Classes have been sapping my time more than I thought they would in recent days; have you ever spent two and a half hours on five lines of php code??!! Yeah that's no fun.

Anyway, back to the photos!! This is Kelly and Brandon; they are such a great couple, and we had a great time at their wedding! I just got done ordering their album, and can't wait to show them all their photos!

Am I a Workaholic??

So today I'm sitting at the computer pretty much all day, feeling all my muscles tighting up because Tuesday night I played three matches of soccer (after a two week layoff from that salmonella), and I realized I think I have a problem. I don't know how to relax anymore. A typical day has me up around 6:30 or so, grabbing a quick bowl of cereal, and then usually right into either photo editing or studying by 7:00 or 7:15 at the latest. In the past two days, I've processed about 4000 (yes, four thousand) photos (the processing process consists of opening the photo, adjusting the white balance, exposure, contrast and color levels, then sending it to a process batch). Once those photos were done processing, I went through and did the editing run on all of them. All 4000 photos into another software system; correcting flaws, converting to black and white, etc., on all 4000 photos one-by-one. I also coded a JAVA project, a PHP project, and completed a systems design project.

Now that's all great, and I for one think I deserve a bit of a break. (Oh, I forgot to mention that I vacuumed the whole house, mopped the kitchen and foyer, scrubbed the rugs downstairs, and did four loads of laundry.) The problem is that I really don't know how to relax. I'll sit down on the couch and say to myself, okay, you're not getting up until you've sat here and watched this entire soccer match and relaxed for at least an hour or two. Ten minutes later I'm up to get one of my textbooks or heading back into the den to work on more photos. ARGH!!!!! Some people are too lazy; I'm too un-lazy! What in the world do I need to do???

Some Portraits...

I don't know how, but amidst the chaos of wedding season, we do actually find time to shoot other stuff! :) This is Whitney and Courtney; they hadn't had photos taken together since they were kids.

Michelle & Adam...

As promised, I got caught up on my class projects this afternoon and took a break just long enough to get some more Tylenol and some Tang (nothin' better than Tang when you're sick!), then it was straight back to the computer for photo processing. These shots are from Michelle and Adam's wedding, which was weekend-before-last. As always, we had a great time!! :-)

The 5-second, 103* Update...

Just wanted to let all our faithful readers (all four of you...har-har-har) know that Kel and I haven't dropped off the face of the earth or forgotten that we've got a blog to run. We've just been swamped both behind the camera and away from the camera. We've shot three weddings in the past week and a half, and have been trying to keep up with the processing of images and ordering of prints, we've had a sick kiddie, and then a sick Johnny. Yup, Kel got to take charge and pretty much be the primary shooter at our past wedding, as I was sporting a shiny red face from my 103* salmonella-induced fever. She did a smashing job, and we still got all our usual killer shots (I used the monopod to help hold the camera (and myself) up), and I hope to have the images processed in the next several days.

Other pressing concerns continue to be my classes. Learning six new programming languages this semester, so trying to keep all that straight in my head is like trying to untangle the mess of wires behind our TV! I've got a ton of projects due in the next two days, so as soon as those are done I'm back at the photo processing.

Oh yeah, can't forget about hockey season rapidly approaching! With my fever slowly dropping down below 100*, I drove to the north side today to do the player headshots for the Ice and do a promo shot with a bunch of Shriners / former hockey players. Cool stuff! Just wish I wasn't quite so preoccupied with how many steps it was to the nearest bathroom! ;-) (Was that TMI? I still have a fever...gimme a break!)

Our First Book!!

Be sure to check out http://www.lulu.com/browse/book_view.php?fCID=404412 and buy a couple copies!