Picture This

When is a hot dog not a hot dog? When it's covered with kimchi from the Kogi BBQ truck at yesterday's South Bay Food Festival. Oh, and when I'm taking pictures of it with my *new camera* [crowd roars with approval]. No more sloppy, out-of-focus, dim pictures. Well, maybe just fewer sloppy, out-of-focus, dim pictures. But willya look at the definition on that cabbage!

The irony is that I got this camera just hours after I really could have used it. On Friday I was invited to cover a swanky luncheon for our local CBS news online edition (why, thank you for asking - it was lunch at MB Post for the Los Angeles Food and Wine Festival) and I was supposed to take pictures. So I brought my sad little point-and-shoot camera and I brought back some sad little point-and-shoot photos. But just wait to see what I can come up with next time.

So I haven't really read the manual yet and I've just been fiddling around with the camera. But it seems pretty intuitive. Within moments of picking it up for the first time, I was able to take this kind of cool/sad portrait of Luke at karate.

Here's a Luke story to counter this seemingly forlorn picture: Luke and I were at the store, and when he got distracted by looking at something (soda, no doubt), he and I were momentarily separated. When he came back and found me, he said, "Mom, when I turned around and didn't see you, I had, like, three exclamation points over my head."

I hope to take photos of Zach too, but for the moment, he is doing the main work of creating pictures at our house. Here I present his newest masterwork, "Vegetable Family" (a potato, a carrot, a tomato, and a green onion). Now that's what I call a picture.