We are so proud to be living in a state that has formalized gay and lesbian marriage, and Saturday we went to our first wedding of two brides. Lisa and Jessica tied the knot one year after receiving their domestic partnership papers, which, one year ago, was as close as they could get to being married. After Referendum 74 passed in November, they were among the first in line on December 8th when the King County courthouse started handing out gay marriage licenses for the first time — they opened the courthouse at midnight that day to accommodate the hundreds of couples who were eager to get hitched and help set a precedent.

Erin and I got to play a small part in the wedding when Jessica and Lisa asked Erin to help them create a guestbook. They settled on having a series of photos framed with space around the photos for guests to sign. We decided to use ‘found’ photos of the numerals making up their wedding date, so down we went to Golden Gardens — where Jessica and Lisa met — in search of the numbers 1, 26, and 13. We decided it was as much fun to craft the numbers out of the materials on what was that day a very frosty beach. Here’s what we came up with:

We were worried there might not be enough room for signatures if people started writing little stories and well wishes, so we made another frame just in case:

Fortunately, the first frame was just the right amount of space, so we hope they get to use the second frame for cute wedding photos. Speaking of which, a few more pics…. Congratulations, Lisa and Jessica!

Erin loves a brunch wedding!

The wedding guest book in action

With Matt, a high school friend of Jessica who officiated

It was a self serve bar, but Erin and Jen facilitated the spread of mimosas

Prettiest girl at the wedding who wasn’t a bride =)

Fortunately, January has started out cold and frosty, which in a typical Northwest weather pattern means plenty of blue sky and sun. We’ve been out soaking up a little vitamin D these past weekends — a few pics follow, as always click to enlarge.

Richmond Beach

A dip in the sound at Richmond Beach dog park

From the beach at Golden Gardens

Big eared Rye

Frosted fern fronds in the back yard

In the backyard

Gnawing on a frozen stick

Back on Thanksgiving Day, we went hiking instead of pigging out for a change. This made me happy. Erin, I think, was happy enough because she had her iPod full of “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” episodes and other podcasts — hiking is definitely more my cup of tea than Erin’s.

Mossy tree trunks are the order of the day along this trail

We visited Granite Falls to do a nice, flat riverside hike called the Lime Kiln Trail. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, this area had a community built around quarrying lime for industrial uses. There was a big 20 foot high kiln used to ‘cook’ the limestone into powdered lime before shipping via railroad to Everett, where it was used as a ‘whitening agent at paper mills and as a fluxing agent’ (according to the blurb at the trailhead). I didn’t know what a fluxing agent age, so I just looked it up. There are a variety of minerals/chemicals used in refining metals (lime being one of them), and these ‘fluxing agents’ can have properties ranging from helping to purify the metal to preventing oxidation.

Doing this hike, we didn’t really see any vestiges of the railroad, though much of the trail is supposedly on the old railroad grade. Once you get to a certain stretch, you do see a number of rusty old abandoned tools (big old saw blades and such) that have been purposely left in place as historical artifacts, and the old kiln is still there, too.

This one felt like it justified the sepia tone treatment

What you mostly see is an insanely moist environment. The trail runs along the Stillaguamish River, and everywhere you look the trees are covered in moss, and ferns line the valley. A gorgeous, emerald hike that’s easy and just an hour or so outside of Seattle. As always, click on pictures to see a larger version.

A good place to be if you’re a mushroom

Erin laughed at me for my hillbilly look, complete with flannel, wool pants, and the vestiges of my Movember mustache

I had never really painted anything on anyone’s face. So Erin let me practice on her the night before:

I think it was a success

I of course had been letting my facial hair grow out for the month so I could give myself a nice horseshoe ‘stache.

Besides working on our own mustaches, we needed marketing materials. Erin cranked out some giant mustache signs while I toiled away on some brochures for people who needed help deciding what kind of ‘stache they wanted.

I stuck these into an old three panel restaurant menu cover I have

Which one would you choose? (Click to enlarge, as always)

This was a volunteer gig at a 5K run to be held at Magnuson Park. Seattle has never had a mustache dache before, but apparently it was ready for it. 2000 runners were signed up at $45 dollars a pop. Something about wearing a mustache is just inherently fun, and people showed up in all manner of costumes. We had no idea how many would want a mustache painted on, but the answer was “quite a few”. We were cranking out mustaches from 8:30 to 10:30, and we guess we painted 30 or 40 people each.

Erin wanted to be the most overdone person there, so she gave herself a 5 o-clock shadow to go with her chin strap and Motorhead style stache

Mostly we painted women runners. We had a few little kids (I did one on a six-month-old in a stroller who had blind trust in me!), and a few men who either hadn’t bothered to grow a ‘stache, couldn’t muster the bravado of a real stache, or of course simply lacked the facial faculties to produce a little caterpillar on their lip.

Love the t-shirts to go along with our mustache handiwork

Our crack team of Mustache Artistes

Here are a couple of screen grabs from the Komo News photo gallery of the Mustache Dache to give a little more flavor:

There’s Erin in the background!

Running never looks that fun to me, but maybe with a mustache it would be fun.

It turns out that facepainting indeed is a hoot, we had a blast doing it. Next year we need a bigger team to increase our coverage of people’s upper lips!

The original theme I created for this site

For the past year or so, though, I’ve not been happy with the site any more, partly because it looked like a standard WordPress blog, and as a professional web designer, it’s painful to have a personal website look ordinary.

More importantly, though, the site as originally constructed did not show off photos well, nor was it simple for Erin to update simply with a new favorite photo — there was too much emphasis on writing text, rather than just putting up photos.

I’ve attempted to rectify these issues with the new theme for our site, which launched a couple of days ago. If you go check it out, bear in mind that it’s new, it’s a little cutting edge, and there are parts of the site that might be a little broken. If this were a commercial site, I wouldn’t release it yet, but I’m willing to put up with some broken layout on a personal blog.

New theme in all its photo glory!

The theme is built on top of a pre-made theme I bought from Elegant Themes. I had been wanting to have a layout with a narrow column on the left for logo and navigation, and then a big scrolling area on the right for photos. This is a big trend in web design inspired in large part by Pinterest. It just so happened that Elegant Themes has released a brand new theme called Origin which accomplished much of what I wanted to do. They also built ‘infinite scroll’ into it, so that really, you don’t even have to leave the homepage to get a chance to see the entire site’s contents — you just keep scrolling.

Any pro designer who works heavily in WordPress, as I do, leans on pre-made themes to do a large chunk of the work of designing a new theme — it’s just too much work to make one all the way from scratch, unless you’re working for a client with a big budget.

The theme I bought did a lot of things well, but not surprisingly I wanted to change a lot of things (besides just colors). Most importantly, I added a gigantic slideshow at the top of the homepage and on category pages. The neat thing about this slideshow is that it grabs random images from the history of our site, so every time you view the homepage (or refresh it), you get to see 12 new images in the slideshow.

Besides being super photo-heavy like I wanted, the new theme is also ‘responsive’. This is a major trend in web design that acknowledges the giant range of devices used to view websites today; we have tiny phones, tablets, small and large laptops, and desktop users with huge screens, all with the power to view full fledged modern sites. The new theme reacts to the size of the viewers monitor, and adapts to make best use of that screen size. So if you view the site on your phone, it looks different than when you view it on your big monitor at home. The following screenshots give you an idea of what I mean:

Mobile phone landscape orientation

Mobile phone portraite orientation

Tablet portrait orientation

It’s interesting to be your own client. I had to ask myself, what do I want from this site? Most importantly, I want it to be easy to quickly upload a new photo with an accompanying sentence or two, so that Erin and I are both inspired to make more use of it. By us using it more, I hope it will serve as the best place for anyone to view our photos (and of course read my ramblings), and that includes us. It’s nice to know that every time you look at the site you’re likely to see something different.

And hey, if you notice anything funky about this site as you’re viewing it, feel free to let me know via a comment. You are all beta testers.

As a guy who loves all-manual SLR cameras, and has a decent understanding of the geeky side of photography, I’ve always felt a little challenged by the Powershot. Given good light, it takes crisp pictures, and I’ve slowly filled up my hard drive with pictures that make me happy. However, it lacks fundamental controls that a serious hobbyist like me wants.

So what did I buy? Despite considering a move to a digital SLR, I’ve done a smaller upgrade: the Olympus XZ-1.

My new buddy

I was convinced by a good deal on Amazon after lurking in their camera department for a few weeks reading reviews.

The XZ-1 is still essentially a point and shoot; it does not have interchangeable lenses, and if you want to zone out and let it do the work, there is an all auto setting (of course). It also is small and light enough to let you take it everywhere. However, it does have aperture and shutter priority settings, which is what I really wanted, and it has a lens which opens all the way to F1.8, which means it is capable of gorgeous portraits (among other things). And since doggie portraits are what I do the most, this means a lot to me. =)

It also lets you export Raw photos instead of JPGs, which is perfect for me because I love nothing more than tweaking my photos in Photoshop. I can’t believe how long it’s taken me to step up this little bit in the camera world.

So what does all this mean? Some examples are in order. Click on any of the photos to enlarge.

First, I have better control of what the camera focuses on. The XZ-1 is not perfect in this sense, but it does let you pick from 11 zones in the viewfinder if you want to focus on something besides what the camera *thinks* it should be focusing on.

Which dog do I want to focus on?

A point and shoot camera will most likely try to make both dogs be in focus, and it can be confoundingly difficult to convince it otherwise. My new buddy lets me do this easily.

Controlling depth of field is probably the thing that makes me happiest about the new camera. The old camera would always try to have the whole image in focus; this is great for landscapes, but almost nothing else. For portraits especially, you want that nice, defocused background, and the only way to really get it is with a wide open lens.

The image on the left was taken with the Powershot. You often struggle to get it to pick up the intended subject, and then a point and shoot usually tries to get the whole image in focus. The shot on the right I just took yesterday with the new camera. With a bit of zoom and a wide open lens, the subject really pops in front of a gorgeous soft background.

Besides some of the essential manual camera controls, the new camera has lots of fun features like auto bracketing, sequential shooting, and target focus. The last two are going to be great fun with the dogs. Basically, you focus on a moving target like a dog, and the camera will keep it in focus. Meanwhile, in sequential shooting mode, you can pulse new photos quickly, allowing you to hopefully catch a great facial expression or composition in a moving scene.

I’ve barely started playing with this camera, but it’s going to be a ton of fun! Hope no one minds looking at even more doggie photos!

Dogs? Check. (Don’t forget to pack Boli’s lifejacket. He only needs it because he swims so damn much and it helps prevent exhaustion).

Baker Lake? Wow. Amazing place. We went up there a few weeks ago to scout out a potential camping trip with friends that didn’t materialize. Instead, it was just us, the dogs, and a great big scenic lake practically all to ourselves.

It’s shocking what a dropoff in people there is after Labor Day. A few Saturdays ago, there were folks camped out on every nook and cranny of the lake. This weekend, hardly anyone, even though it was a perfect 70 degree weekend (the last of 48 straight days without rain in Seattle, as it turned out — second longest streak in recorded local weather history).

Here’s a montage of my favorite photos from the weekend:

Doggie Weekend at Baker Lake 2012 from Christopher Cox on Vimeo.

The dogs did great in the canoe! When Bolivar is near water, he basically whimpers until he can plunge in — such is his love of swimming. So yes, we had one whimpering gold dog the whole time he was in the canoe. When camp was set up, we did take the canoe out and let him swim alongside; he’s a trooper, and he really does love just to be out in the water. He doesn’t need a stick or ball to retrieve, he loves simply paddling around on his own. Which is the opposite of Rye; our brown dog looks like an otter when he finally decides to get wet, such is his speed and power in the water. However, he only swims if there’s competition with the gold one, and only if there’s a good sized stick involved. Otherwise, he’d prefer to stick to shore and find stinky things to roll in.

Next year, dammit, we’re going to get a gang of friends to go with us, and take over the rustic little campground on the point — it’s an incredible place that we want to share.

The pictures below are in the video montage, but some of them are so good I want to show them off at full size (click on them to pull up a larger size).

He doesn't care that it's so beautiful, he just likes getting wet

"Give me the emerald lake background!"

My swimming buddies

Yes, the water really is that perfect

Northwest Summer!

This year, we indulged ourselves in a little primadonna fun with Boli, who now sports a nice lion cut instead of a boring ol’ buzz. Erin playfully derided me, but I thought it would be a good idea to take a picture and some written instructions to the groomer:

She may have just been indulging me, but the groomer seemed happy to have my notes, after letting me explain what I wanted for five minutes (hey, we don’t have kids, so this energy has to go somewhere!).

The initial results were close, but not perfect:

His ears were too long, and the shaggy mane was too shaggy. The effect was a bit girly, like he was wearing a big woolly shrug sweater. It also didn’t help that he was super clean and perfume-y. My friend Sharon said “He looks like a poodle!”

I don’t think it was that bad, but it did need some refinement. Fortunately my beard trimmer does indeed work on Sir Fluffy, and a quick touch up on the ears and the edge of his mane helped a lot:

Here he is hunting on the plains!

Tongue shot!

He actually gets a good number of adoring comments at the dog park, which is pretty much all we needed to feel justified. “Is his name Leo the Lion?” “Oh, honey, look at the lion haircut!” And my favorite, “Not every dog can pull off that haircut, but he rocks it, dude!”, a quote from the guy with the Great Dane named Angus.

So now we have a Rye-jackal and a Bo-lion. We love our jungle beasts!

We’ve had the good fortune to go out on Lake Washington a couple of times these past few weeks, and Erin’s need for speed has been at least briefly sated. After years of not having any boating friends, we suddenly have two friends with power boats (Dan and Chris — two of the nicest guys you could ever want as friends!) The only times I’ve been out on anything but a kayak were sailing a few times with an old housemate’s family. Living about a mile from Lake Washington, we go there frequently to swim with the dogs, but getting out on a boat is super special.

Erin couldn’t stand to be on a boat and not take a turn at the wheel (not sure this was a good idea, Dan!). This picture tells you all you need to know about Erin:

Hold onto your seats, everyone!

We also got on the water for some tubing action…

What a perfect day for tubing!

Tubing kinda gives you an irrepressible grin

I think Erin likes tubing: