Snow is falling yet again in Ballard. Big wet flakes are falling, but since making these pictures, over an inch has accumulated outside.

Yesterday Heidi bravely bought her first brand new car, a 2009 Ford Escape Hybrid 4WD.

Here she is in the sales office driving a hard bargain on the sale price and the trade-in value on her 4Runner.


Heidi opted for a silver Escape, with cloth interior. The dealer had 2 other hybrids in stock, both with leather and navigation systems. Originally we were looking for leather, but Ford offers only one leather color in the Escape Hybrid--a light tan they call "stone." We prefer the look of the darker cloth seats. It's also hard to justify the extra $2K+ you pay for a navigation system when you have a passenger (me) who can do Google-maps for you on his iPhone.



Below is Heidi at the wheel during here new car orientation.


The salesman saw me snapping photos and thought it would be fun to bring out the big red bow, but the car was Heidi's gift to herself. I did promise to buy her some heavy duty floor and cargo mats and a pet net to keep Sebastian in back and the upholstery clean.



If you want to shoot someone inside a car and have only a built-in, on-camera flash, bump up both your exposure compensation and flash power compensation. For this shot I think I had them both set to +2 stops. The hood of the car was totally blown out of course, but I threw a -2 stop gradient correction on the bottom half of the photo in Adobe Camera Raw, to darken the foreground. Not too bad for a snapshot.