vacation video

I put together a little vacation video to share on facebook and had a lot of issues trying to get it to upload. I finally had to upload it to youtube at Luke's house, then post the link on FB. However since I used 3 songs in it you cannot view it from your phone or ipad. Whatever youtube!!

So we'll try this and see if it works!

July 4th

We went to my mom's again this year for the 4th. Justin has his age group from church over there and grills burgers and hot dogs then shoots some pretty impressive fireworks. I remembered my tripod this year so I could take some interesting sparkler pictures and I got a few of the fireworks.

These first three were taken with the fireworks setting on my camera

Then for these two I switched to Shutter Speed priority setting and set my shutter speed at 5" and 6" time to try and capture more than one of the fireworks they were shooting, it didn't really work though

Then the kids played with the sparklers. Again I used the shutter speed setting. I tried different speeds, 6", 3.2" and 2.5". Kaitlyn and Aaliyah tried to make hearts but we couldn't get it quite right. Oh well, they still look cool. 

family photos

On Tuesday night we went down to the beach to try and take some family photos. We went down about 30 minutes to early, the sun had not completely gone down but everyone was getting impatient so we went with what we had. Also the boys were not so cooperative so what you see is what you get. I did a little editing magic in iphoto and here is what we have:

Original

 edited to this

 original

 edited to this

original

 edited to this

 original

 edited to this

 original

 edited to this

 original (with the help of a tripod and self-timer)

 edited to this

The best ones I got were of Aaliyah and Kaitlyn, a post for those is coming soon!

Beach- the instagram version

While I took a lot of pictures with my camera I took many with my phone (about 100). I can easily upload to the various social media apps I love this way. These are the photos I uploaded using instagram, a popular photo sharing app. You can use a filter to change the look of your photos plus I love how it makes them square. 

I took this one within the first hour of my arrival and texted it to a few friends, you know for jealousy sake.

For anyone looking, this is the perfect beach bag, from 31 gifts. 

Picture Perfect

Fish face

Adorable face

Out to dinner fun

We mainly ate breakfast and lunch in the condo but ventured out to dinner most nights. Panama City has many good and fun restaurants to try.

Sunday night we started with Mellow Mushroom. We have one in Memphis but it is on the other side of town and I am the only one who had eaten there before. They have a really cool transformer in the lobby.

Monday night we ate at Margaritaville at Pier Park. It was fun and entertaining. There was music on the big screen and at the top of every hour they played and everybody sang "Margaritaville" by Jimmy Buffet. They also had these girls walking around on stilts and making balloon hats for the kids. 

Wednesday night we ate at Barefoot Beach Club. This place was neat in that all the seating was outside and there was a playground the kids could play on while we waited for our food. They also had this really cool huge red chair out on the beach. 

This was the view from out table while we ate. 

Thursday night we ate at Tacky Jack's. I got the buffalo chicken wrap and it was the best thing I ate the whole week, so good. 

Plus there is a swimming pool on the patio so the kids swam while we waited for our food. 

And Friday night we tried Hammerhead Fred's, it was good as well but would have been more fun to be able to sit on the patio. There was a wait for a table so I just said first available and we got inside. 

We had to wait about an hour for a table at Margaritaville and about 20 minutes for a table at Hammerhead Fred's but the others didn't have a wait. Pretty good considering we were a party of 8 and it was Florida in June.

riding the jet ski

One of the days we were at the beach, Luke rented a couple of jet skis for an hour.

playing in the pool

This condo has two pools, one has a hot tub at one end. They are pretty nice only they were fairly cold this year. Of course the kids didn't care but there wasn't much relaxing for me in the pool unless the hot tub wasn't too crowded.