Well, I guess there's no two better metaphors for launching anything new--in our case, a brand new blog--than the arrival of the cherry blossoms and the arrival of a new baby.

(Regular readers of our old blog would immediately cite a third, the birds about to hatch outside our window, but since that has yet to happen, we'll stick with two.)

 If you haven't noticed, the blog you're looking at is about six hours old. My wife, Maya, conceived and executed the entire affair in less than three days. There was nothing wrong with our old blog, truth be told--and you can still get to those older posts by clicking the link at right-- but we were getting a little cranky, quite frankly,  about the limiting size of the images there.

 I'm not a very good at things like Flash and Photoshop and the like but Maya is a self-taught wiz. And so here we are: the very first post of the new and improved Dark Slide. In fact, for those of you who have been wondering for the last two years what the heck a dark slide actually looked like, wonder no more. You can now feast your eyes upon this tiny little piece of engineering marvel: thin and flat, no bigger than the palm of one's hand and the source  of more cursing than I'd care to remember . Lose it, and you couldn't take your Hasselblad back off. Pull it out of a 4 x 5 holder to soon and you expose your sheet of film. In fact, sometimes when I'm doing a large format shoot, you can watch as my brain goes through this silent mantra: focus camera, close lens, load film, pull dark slide, trip shutter, return dark slide, pull film, Whew! That's always fun.

 Anyway, I called this little writing and photography blog The Dark Slide a few years back, a) to remind myself of the fragility of the analog world, something that was being lost a bit in the Age of Photoshop and b) because it sounded oh-so clever. Things are still fragile these days and about 1,054 people have asked me over the years why I have a "dark side." So I'm not sure how clever I was. But I'm happy to have a new home, with a bit more breathing room. Thanks, Maya! And a special thanks to some of my more dedicated Dark Slide readers like Bruce Snell, Julie Newell, Laura Gonzalez, Erin Reed and Rachel LaCour.

 As I said, one of things we wanted to do with our new space was bring you larger images, sans the whole double-clicking thing. And as you can see by this photo of Heather Furguson and Gus Coldebella down by the Tidal Basin, larger finally seems, well, large. I always hate having to explain to couples and families that I only go down to the cherry blossoms at sunrise. And when I say sunrise, I mean sunrise. Heather and Gus got it immediately and didn't complain one peep. We met down by my favorite secret parking area, which the National Park Service has rendered a no-fly zone this season (no, not the paddleboat lot) and were still able to illegally park  long enough for the sun to rise. You can count the people out and about on one hand, the light is gorgeous, and we were back home in time to read the morning newspaper. As Rober De Niro said in Brazil, "get in, get out and nobody gets hurt."

 (Like a vampire defying light, I might venture back to the blossoms at 4:30 p.m. this Friday. My buddy Pete Eisler, the world's best investigative reporter/blues guitarist, will be performing at the Jefferson Memorial plaza with his band, Judge Smith. After years of venturing to see Pete play on what seems to always  to be the most frigid day of the cherry blossom festival, I swore I would never go back. But the weather forecast looks promising...)

And now on to the story of the day, a new birth for the Washington Nationals. No, not that birth! Enough with this new stadium already. After today's Washington Post story about four hotdogs and a Coke costing about as much as a new mortgage, I need a break from stadium stories. No, this birth was a real one, and though it didn't actually happen inside the confines of Nationals Park on opening night, it came pretty close.

Back in July of 2006, I shot the wedding of Dennis Yedwab and Blake Newmark at the historic Sixth and I Synagogue downtown. They had  a great wedding--the only couple before or since to go bowling after their reception. And I always loved this photo of them, en route to said bowling alley. I always wondered what Blake was doing with her hands at the time, though now, two years later, it seems downright prescient! Anyway, we all share a great love of baseball, particularly the Mets. I thought I was wacky, still saving my scrapbook from childhood, with signed photos of Jon Matlack and Rusty Staub, but Dennis and Blake are nuts. They travel to games all over and are true baseball aficionados.

 Like us, Blake and Dennis have season tickets to the Nats. Though they were pretty far along in their pregnancy this past Sunday evening, they still ventured out to see the home opener at the new ballpark. Who wouldn't, right? As Dennis told me a few hours ago in his room at GW Hospital, "We took the Metro. We timed the contractions and it seemed okay." Their hope, they told me, was to last through the fifth inning president's race.

 Or even one inning. The contractions started coming a bit faster and by the bottom of the first they decided it was time to go home and get to the hospital. "The people behind us looked at us like we were crazy.Who leaves opening night after the first inning? But they figured out what was going on," said Blake. "We're going to have a baby," she explained. A few excuse me, pardon me, excuse me's later, and they were out of Section 310.

 The next morning, this past Monday, at 11:37 a.m., Audrey Newmark Yedwab was born. I stopped by their room this afternoon, something I try to do with all my wedding couples from yesteryear, and took some pics. Someday, when she's old enough to appreciate it, little Audrey will know that Ryan Zimmerman's game-winning homer run in front of a packed stadium on its very first night wasn't the only "storybook ending" in town.

 Take care, guys.

Matt