New Camera

This year for Natalie's birthday I decided to get her a new camera. About a week ago I was looking online and tried to decide which one to get her. I thought I had made a decision with the Nikon D3200 but my uncle e-mailed me and told me to get the D5100 instead. I followed his advice and got the camera in the mail Monday afternoon.

 

Natalie's birthday is still five weeks away. I was going to hide the camera in the safe but the box was big and I would have had to move a lot of things around. So I told Adri to ask Natalie if she wants to wait until her birthday. Natalie walked in the room and without it being wrapped, "surprise".

 

The next day I decided we should all go up South Mountain to try this thing out. So yesterday after work we made the drive up the mountain and took some pictures. I have to say, this camera was quite the upgrade from my Canon S3IS. It's fast, the pictures are really sharp, and it was a really good investment. But don't take my word for it, look at the pictures below.

 

Decided it was time to teach Adri how to play football. She loves to try to play with my football all the time but there is a no ball rule in the house. She had a really fun time playing football with me yesterday.

Downtown Phoenix.

Of course, shaking her booty.

I tried to capture a classic Sonoran Desert scene. I think this turned out decent but I was about 2 minutes too late from having a great picture.

South Mountain Thunderstorm

Last Friday we decided to drive up South Mountain again. Natalie's aunt is in town visiting right now and we wanted to take her out to see some of Arizona. Due to the weather that day we didn't have many options. It had been raining off and on all morning. We were thinking about finding something to do indoors but then I heard that we were suppose to have a 3 hour break from the rain so I decided if we leave right away we could go up to Dobbin's Lookout.

Well the 3 hour break from the rain was inaccurate. As we were driving up the mountain we could see the storm clouds moving in. We got up to Dobbin's Lookout and got about 3-4 minutes to walk around and look at the storm moving in before we were forced back to the car. Natalie was actually down below the shelter with her aunt and I was off to the side taking pictures when it got bad. I saw some lightning, felt the wind pick up, and then saw the clouds rushing towards us. I started yelling for Natalie to get back to the car and she apparently didn't hear me. When I ran over to her and told her to look West she took Adri and ran for the car. We made it to the car just in time.

We sat in the car for the next 15 minutes waiting for it to clear. It never did. Instead it hailed really hard on us, so hard we almost had to yell to hear each other in the car. Once I realized it wasn't going to clear anytime soon I decided to drive around the back side of the mountain just to see what is there. Afterwards we drove out to Mesa to eat at Tia Rosa's, a place several friends recommended I try. Even in Mesa we saw hail all over the sides of the freeway.

When we left Tia Rosa's we looked over at South Mountain and it was completely clear. Just our luck right?

At least we got to enjoy a thunderstorm. One of the things I really miss after leaving Florida, watching crazy thunderstorms. I'm thinking this might be the place to park, grab a snack, and enjoy watching thunderstorms this summer.