Saying farewell to the tree

I love my Christmas tree, or what is more appropriately called 'New Years Tree'. I have had a tree around holiday time my whole life. As we do not celebrate Christmas in my family/Russia we always exchanged gifts at New Years. At you might realize, staying up to open presents at midnight gets a little old, and waiting until midday January 1st when everyone actually wakes up also doesn't work well, so we've in general switched to opening presents on Christmas, since that is when everyone else does it, though we have also opened on Orthadox Christmas or New Years or just a random day in December before. It is all about the presents and the beautiful tree anyways, not the specific day. =)

So now that I am living accross the country from the family, I have started putting up my own tree - Christmas or New Years or whatever you call it. It must be real, because it is just much more friendly that way (though clean up is indeed rather unfortunate). The only big problem is that I am not in a house and can thereby not just burn my tree when I am done with it in April (how long the tree at my parents house often stays up...). I have to take it out to the dump yard by January 9th, which isn't even to Russian New Years!

So today's photo is dedicated to saying farewell to my tree. It's been fun, but tomorrow you're going to be taken down!

January 4th


From a photo perspective, today made me realize that I need to use the right lens and settings for the right photo. This was not the right lens, and all of the photos I did with various settings were not that great. This is the best one I got and it was only a little salvagable in Lightroom. I got a much better one before with a different lens. Sure makes a different, right?