Well, everyone’s growing up. Dan’s the last to get married (the youngest three siblings don’t count because there’s too big a gap). Here are some photos from his engagement party.

What does The Man in the Yellow Hat do for a living that allows him to afford a big apartment in NYC and a big house upstate?

A great photo doesn’t necessarily need good planned posing. Take a look at this shot of Tony, Alex, and Scarlett:

I didn’t plan it, but I did have to wait for the right pose to present itself. It would be a tighter story without Scarlett, but I think it still conveys a coherent message: kids enjoying ice cream and conversing. A kiddie version of going to the bar, essentially.

I just couldn’t decide which version I liked best.

Lots and lots of people ask on Reddit every single day how to get photos that look like they were created with VSCO. Basically - crushed blacks and split-toned. Everyone always gives instructions on how to do it in Lightroom. But no one ever talks about how to do it in RawTherapee, so I decided to create this little tutorial.

Take what you learn here and adapt it to fit your style.

We’re hardly ever dressed up so nicely. So when we all got dressed up for Dan’s engagement party, I wanted to get a quick family portrait before we left. The pose wasn’t perfect due to the rush, and I’ll be elaborating a bit more on that in a future blog post, but I do like it as a bit of record keeping. Slightly more than a snapshot, but not how I’d have done it if we weren’t in a hurry.

After someone told me that a PDF I’d created in Calligra Office was illegible and having issues with spreadsheets loading slowly, I decided to install LibreOffice. However, rather than go with the version in the repos, I decided to go with Flatpak - which allows for a more advanced version via the usage of runtimes. First, I had to install Flatpak:

sudo dnf install flatpak

Then I needed to install the runtimes. The LibreOffice page uses the –user tag, but I think that is just for installing it just to yourself rather than for the whole system. So I am omitting that.

After we were done doing our multi-generational photos, my mom put Stella on the grass to take some portraits. If you follow her on Facebook, you already know how those turned out. I took a few. These two were my favorites:

Ever since Sam was born, I’ve been looking forward to a 4 generation male portrait. I’d done a female line portrait with Scarlett up to her great-grandmother. It was finally time to do the same for me. While we were out there and dressed up, we took a few other configurations of family photos. All the males are wearing guayaberas, a traditional shirt worn in the Caribbean, especially in Cuba.

They’d never been to DC before so we went to the usual tourist spots. Also there - my parents, daughter, and youngest brothers.