I an in Miami for a derm conference and wondering why people ever decided to live in Chicago.

We got a record amount of snow in the Chicago area.  12.9 inches.  It was really fun and even shoveling it wasn’t too bad.  Here is a photo of Ashlee’s car just about buried.  Another little known fact is that there was a 4.2 magnitude earthquake too.  Maybe the weight of all the snow triggered it.  The dogs and Hannah are loving the snow, but it is too deep for everyone except Cinder.

This is our first family portrait to include Mara.  It turned out really nice.  It reminds me of the Garth Brooks song “Two of a Kind Working on a Full House.”  Enjoy the music and the next time you hear it, we really will be.

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A few posed photos with me and Mara when she was 1 day old.

Can tell which is Hannah and which is Mara.  Scroll down for the answer.

Hannah’s on the left, 1st photo, Mara’s on the right, second photo.

Mara Lorraine Pace was born a healthy baby girl at 2:16pm, weighed 6 pounds 10 oz, 18 inches tall, and doing well. More info to come. Ashlee is doing great too.

I read about this in another blog post. You toss your camera and take pictures of Christmas lights. To do it, you set your camera to have anywhere from a 0.5 to 1 second exposure and an aperture of f/8, then set the timer and throw the camera up just before the shutter opens. Then catch it just after it closes. Good luck and don’t ruin too many cameras.
Here is a link to a really cool story on the history of Christmas lights.

I have been thinking about photographing fireflies every since the first time I saw one (which was actually when I can out to Chicago for med school). As you can imagine it is extremely difficult. I took about 100 shots and only got streaks on these five. I did take a nice video too. It took about 2 hours on 2 different nights. I started out by capturing them in a glass and quickly realized they don’t light up if they don’t fly. I then tried to release them right in front of the camera and they all flew off in different directions. Next, I tried just firing the camera from the tripod hoping I would get lucky, which happened twice. Finally, I resorted to chancing them around using long shutter speeds.