Merry Christmas!

A day late . . .
We had a really nice Christmas this year, despite it being the first one without my Dad.
I've got tons of pictures to share, BUT I made the big move before Christmas to begin shooting all my pictures in RAW. In order to do that, Dan gave me Photoshop CS4 for Christmas and also a 1 TB external hard drive, plus an 8G memory card for the camera.
Shooting in RAW gives you TONS more options in the editing process and enables you to fix just about anything that went wrong with the picture when you took it (except for not focusing on your subject). But, if your white balance is not set correctly, you can fix that; if your over exposed or under exposed, you can fix that. The list goes on and on.
BUT, and this is a HUGE BUT, I don't have a workflow developed to get my photos from my camera to my computer and to my new back up storage yet. Not to mention that shooting in RAW adds a step or two to the process of transferring, editing and converting to jPEG. See, I really have no idea what I'm talking about.
The bottom line is that until I can get CS4 installed on my computer and get my external hard drive up and running (not to mention, we ordered the wrong model) I can't begin to upload the hundreds of pictures from the CF card. I'm just not comfortable doing that just yet . . .
I've heard a few horror stories from various people in my photography class of losing pictures and I really don't want that to happen.

Big news despite all of this:

Louie and Emily are tickled pink with all the fun things that they received from Santa and family! Louie did receive his Thomas socks and all is well! (Santa came to my mom's house on Christmas eve and brought stockings for all the kids, his didn't contain Thomas socks and he was not happy about that, not one little bit!) But they were in his stocking on Christmas morning and all is well!
Emily LOVES her doll house and can't wait to take all the furniture out of the boxes and arrange the house.
Fun times had by all!