nathan jara

Summer vacation this year afforded me the opportunity to travel to the sunny shores of Corolla, located in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Vacationing with family, both immediate and extended, provided for a great week of visiting, eating, napping, sunning, reading, sanding, ocean-ing, and general beach bumming. Corolla and the Outer Banks are a beautiful part of the Atlantic shoreline. The beach has certainly become my favorite vacation spot, well, except for maybe that time I went to Italy ; )

In addition to lots of time with my feet in the sand, we stopped in Williamsburg, Virginia and visited the Colonial Williamsburg area. I was able to take a stroll through the colonial town and really enjoyed seeing a glimpse into the rich heritage of our American ancestors. It’s amazing how times have changed. Another exciting aspect for me during the trip was it gave me a great excuse to use my new digital SLR camera, a Canon Rebel T3i. The camera was a ton of fun to play with, hence the pictures below. Check out more of my photos from the beach and Williamsburg on Picasa.

Sand dunes of Corolla

Dragonfly

Ocean evening

Colonial Williamsburg

I’ve been using flickr to share photos for a while now. I’ve never been really thrilled with it though. The service only allows you to upload so many photos before you have to sign up for a paid subscription to use more space. Pretty poopy. Over the past few nights, I’ve been converting over to Google’s Picasa. It’s pretty sweet! You have 1 gig of space to start, which is awesome. I also downloaded the Picasa Web Album application which makes organizing and uploading photos a breeze. The one feature I really like is the ability to resize photos during the upload process. That way I don’t have to do it myself :) And I just found the Faces feature which is crazy cool. Check out my uploads so far.