Mike Doel’s Weblog

Roasting marshmallows around the fire

This past weekend, our family joined two other families in a campout at Hocking Hills State Park.  Although the weather was hot through the day, we avoided the raindrops.  Highlights include:

1. Cooking in a borrowed cast iron dutch oven turned out great - we used it for four meals with the best being a pork tenderloin mixed with veggies. 
2. Hiking at 3 of the 6 areas in the park (Old Man’s Cave, Rock House, and Conkle’s Hollow)
3. Swimming in the campground pool

Our daughter has had a great time playing softball this year.  I’ve been taking pictures of the team through most of the year and here are a few of the better ones of Cassady.

Mix:

• 1 part sunny day
• 1 part first day of summer vacation
• 2 parts kids
• 2 parts water cannons

Serves: family of four

Our family just back from a fun trip east for Spring Break.  We flew into and out of Portsmouth, NH on Skybus - our first trip on the discount airline (our tickets were $35 each way).  From there, we drove northwest around Lake Winnipesaukee (visiting Julie’s old camp in the process) and then onto Portland, Maine where we spent the night.  The next day, we headed to Boston and spent the next several days seeing the sights.   Of course, pictures tell a better story, so check out the photo gallery of the trip.

On March 7 and 8 of 2008, central Ohio was buried under the biggest snowfall on record for these parts.  The prior record of snow in one day in Columbus had been 12.2 inches with 15.3 inches the record snowfall for a single storm.  With this blizzard, the official snowfall on Saturday the 8th was 15.4 inches and the storm total over the two days was 20.4 inches at Port Columbus Airport.  In our backyard, we seemed to max out at about 16 or 17 inches total from the storm.  In between the shoveling and playing, we managed to snap a few pictures.

One of the family highlights of 2007 was a trip to Alaska.  Julie, Matthew, and Cassady traveled via RV with Jamie and Dave.  Mike flew up and met them for several days a few weeks later.  Some of the best pictures from the trip have been captured in this photo album.

This is Nate Arbabi. Born October 9, 2006 at 8:32pm (PDT) and weighing in at 6 pounds and 8 ounces. My new nephew. I’m so happy for Deb and Amir.

This is a picture of some coins I did this evening. I’m thinking of using it for this month’s Digital Story photo assignment submission contest. The topic for September is “circle” and I thought a close up of some coins might work. To make the shot, I put a plain white shee on my desk, setup a couple of coins on it, and mounted my camera (with flash) on a tripod. To accentuate the lighting and try to remove shadows, I had lights on the side and on top of the subject. Although I don’t have a true macro lens, I was able to use the 24-105 lens at maximum focal length for this. It’s capable of focusing fairly closely, though I couldn’t get closer than this without getting into trouble.

Today, Matthew and Julie were off doing DreamDinners together. This is a place where you prepare meals ahead of time, freeze them, and then use them for a decent meal without much preparation on the day you eat. While they were doing that, Cassady and I headed to Inniswood Metro Gardens. I had never been there before, despite having lived less than a mile away. It’s a pretty place with lots of beautiful flowers to see. This picture was taken with my 24-105mm lens set to maximum aperture in aperture priority mode with maximum focal length. The end result is a very nice diffuse background.