Sold!
Grandma Dailey (my dad’s mother) lived in the country near DeQueen Arkansas for about 37 years. For the last 30 years she lived there alone after the death of her husband, Aubrey. She was an antiques dealer, quilt maker and made the best corn bread. She’s 93 now and her health has gotten to the point where she can’t live alone anymore and has moved in with one of her daughters in Texas. On Saturday she held an auction at her house to sell her furniture and other belongings to get the house ready for it to sell.
Getting Some Play
I’m not sure it means anything, but Australian photographer Neil Creek chose my shot of Pikes Peak to critique on his blog. He liked it. It’s kind of neat for me to see my pic on a blog written on the other side of the world.
More Hummin’
Our two hummers have been coming to the feeder each evening so I set out to shoot them again. I like the background better than my first try, but the angle wasn’t as good. Most of the shots got the back of the birds and, while interesting, you need to be able to see the eye and beak, I think. I’m thinking I’ll move the feeder to a new spot to try to get better angles. Strobist info: Vivitar 285HV at about 120 degrees on camera right at 1/4 power and SB26 about 45 degrees on camera right at 1/4 power.
Photoshopin’
Just messing around with some Photoshop actions downloaded from the Internets. I think it would look better if the blog had a white background.
Tents Are Funny
Abby’s Mimi got Abby a Snow White camping set for her birthday. The set has a sleeping bag, tent, backpack and water bottle. Gina set up the tent today and Abby loved it. Abby found it hysterical when Gina would hit the inside of the tent and make it billow out. It gave me a chance to practice a little Strobistry. A put one flash inside the tent at 1/8 power pointed at Gina’s face and another flash with the umbrella reflector outside the tent at full power pointed at Abby. I think it turned out pretty well.
Jar O Corks Redux
I found this guy’s tutorial on the Internets and thought to myself, “This might work for the jar o corks.” So I totally ripped him off. Surely he expects people to straight copy him if he puts all the details on the Internets, right?
R.I.P. Plecostomus
We woke up to a death in the family on Sunday. Our plecostomus was lying motionless on the bottom of the tank. I don’t know how long he was dead, because I don’t remember noticing him moving for the last few days. Gina said she saw him alive Friday night. Abby was less than devastated. She said, “It’s gross!”
The garage is turning out to be a pretty good photo studio. It’s nice for Abby because the mosquitoes aren’t as bad in there as they are in the back yard. I gave Abby the white-background treatment like I did Gina the night before. (See those on Flickr.) Then we put the bubble grill in there and Abby went crazy rubbing the bubble elixir all over her arms and legs.
Shampoo Ad
Fooling around with my flashes, I tacked a white sheet to the wall in the garage and fired one flash into the background to overexpose it and the other flash into the silver umbrella on camera right to light Gina. This what they call lighting on two planes. The flashes light specific parts of the image separately without affecting each other. The straight headshots weren’t that interesting other than to prove the light setup worked. So we came up with the flying-hair idea.
We did get one regular-type shot I thought was pretty good. Gina had just about run out of patience with me when I snapped this one.
Strobist info: SB26 at 1/2 power into the background and Vivitar 285HV at 1/4 power into a silver umbrella at camera right just out of the frame.
My First Hummer
Since we got the sugar water mix right on the hummingbird feeder, these little guys have been visiting the back yard every night. I set up my two flashes on opposite sides of the feeder set to 1/4 power. I put the camera on a tripod at about 90 degrees to the flashes. Setting the camera to shoot with the remote, I sat on the patio and waited for the hummers to show up. One did. I cranked up the shutter speed to darken the ambient light so that most of the lighting came from the flashes. The flash duration at such a low power is very short, meaning it can stop very fast action, such as a hummingbird’s beating wings. At least that was the theory. And it worked for the most part. I’m not too happy with the background or the angle of the flashes, so I’m going to try again tomorrow.
Get Ready To JUMP!
We’re digging this at the Dailey house.
Our cable has a new channel called Retro Television that carries a lot of old TV shows and we discovered a couple of weeks ago that the classic Johnny Depp series comes on at 8 every night. The show began in 1987, the year Gina and I graduated high school and it was pretty cutting edge at the time. It was on the new Fox network, which had a rep of airing gritty or tasteless fare. I didn’t watch many episodes during the first run, but it made quite a splash among the young and hip.
Two-Flash Donnie
My well-used Nikon SB26 flash came via UPS today and I was pretty pumped. In the Strobist world the 26 is just about the be-all, end-all of flashes. It’s almost 15-year-old technology, but it has a built-in optical slave that fires when it detects the light from another flash. Unfortunately, the Strobist craze has driven up the price on these babies. I almost opted for buying the current generation SB600, but the 26 was $75 cheaper and the 600 won’t fire wirelessly with my D40 camera. The little pop-up flash on the camera will fire the 26 if I don’t want to use the big Vivitar. The 26 won’t do the fancy through-the-lens-exposure control that tells the flash when to stop putting out light when the right exposure is reached, but I want it for manual use anyway. I dusted off old Abe and fired light at him from two sides.
Now I can get on Flickr and say things like: Vivitar 285HV into a silver 43″ umbrella on 1/4 power camera right with a snooted SB26 at 1/64 camera left and little behind model for hair light and a white card at lower camera left for fill on model’s face. 285 fired via poverty wizard with 26 slaved.
10,000!
This is the 10,000th shot on my Nikon D40 I bought back in November. (The camera started over with the numbering at 0001. It skipped 0000. The first shot started at 0001, of course, and the camera isn’t smart enough to know that this wasn’t the very first shot.) I bought it to take pics of Abby, mostly. Our little digital point and shoot was getting outdated and I wanted something a little more flexible. I didn’t realize that the DSLR would reignite my latent interest in photography. I’m looking forward to the next 10,000.
Toad!
Gina found a tiny toad in the back yard and we took Abby out to see it. I put it in her hand and it kept jumping onto the ground in an attempt to flee. Abby would yell, “COME BACK TOAD!”
Then she gave it a kiss. It didn’t turn into a prince, though.
Potty Time
Today we let Abby run around without a diaper again in the hope for a repeat potty performance. Well she went in there, sat on her little potty and POOPED! We danced for joy again. But poop is a lot grosser in that little potty than pee.
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