Post Irony

Weird. It’s been weird this week. It feels like a pocket of calm before everything changes – again. Gina’s been out of town this week leaving Abby and me to forge ahead as a duo. Tuesday was extra dull and I asked Abby what she wanted to do and added that watching Calliou was not an option. She said, “Go to the Big Dam Bridge.” So that’s what we did.

I took my 70-300mm telephoto lens with us because I thought maybe there’d be some gulls flying around, but there weren’t. We walked up the bridge and watched a storm over Pinnacle Mountain. Then we walked down the bridge and out on an unpaved trail that branches off the North Little Rock River Trail. Abby was looking for fire ants. She’s taken a liking to stirring up their mounds and watching the ants go nuts and then running away shrieking. We got our shoes muddy and Abby saw some bugs, but no fire ants.

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When I woke up at 7:30 a.m. Sunday, the sky was clearing after a night of off and on rain and I was so bummed I almost just went back to sleep. I hadn’t gone to sleep until around 4 a.m., which made actually getting up that much harder. (I think I’ve developed insomnia.) Sunny skies spell poor conditions for shooting waterfalls. You need the even, reduced light of overcast skies to make that silky water effect.

But, as we will see, Lady Fortune is a fickle traveling companion.

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After my run Wednesday at Two Rivers Park I headed over to Pinnacle Mountain to see if there was anything worth shooting. I stopped at the arboretum off Pinnacle Mountain Road thinking I might get a shot of some cypress knees down by the Little Maumelle River. I did something to my knee during my run and I was limping pretty heavily. (I later made the self diagnosis of ilotibial band syndrome.) I barely made it to the river and to add insult to injury I couldn’t find anything swampy that I wanted to shoot.

On my limp back up he trail I came across this dead armadillo and decided to try my hand at a little Strobist style off-camera flash. I underexposed the ambient light and let the flash provide the correct exposure on the carcass. It didn’t turn out quite as I had envisioned. I envisioned a well-lit corpse with a goodly expanse of dark forest in the background. But hand-holding the flash while trying to get low on a badly hurting knee while enduring the stink of a dead armadillo is harder than it sounds. I gave up after two frames and this is what I got.

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Abby, Aunt Jodie and I headed to my Mom and Dad’s place in southeast Kansas for a little Easter frivolity. Gina was on injured reserve with a bum shoulder and didn’t make the traveling squad this time. Abby and Jodie held a traditional Easter egg dying party on Saturday.

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Abby loves her rain gear. She’s got two raincoats and two pairs of boots. I’d been telling her that the next time it rains I’d take her out and let her run through puddles with her boots on. The next time it rained was Thursday morning, so we set out to find some good puddles.

We found this one at Murray Park just as another storm was blowing in. She began jumping up and down in the water while I was getting my picture takin’ crap set up. I got everything ready and the exposure set and told her jump and splash, but she said, “I don’t want to.” I asked why and she said her dress was wet and she got some mud on her knee. She said she wanted to find a cleaner puddle before she did any more splashing.

I shot this with my silver umbrella and SB600, but I don’t remember the settings. I do know I underexposed the ambient to get the weird background to go a little dark. Then I added a vignette in Photoshop.

I thought when I widened the content area of the blog it would allow me present these vertical images better, but it turns out it makes it harder. These blog templates weren’t set up to make it easy to create nice designs. I don’t know enough about CSS and all that other crap to make it look like I want it to. The wider area is nice for the horizontal shots though.

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