What with it being Halloween and all, we embarked on some punkin’ carvin’. Abby helped scoop out the innards.
Month: October 2008
Abby was looking pretty cute right after her bath today, so I dragged out my Strobist gear to try some on-axis fill flash. I set up my 45 inch Westcott reflective silver umbrella with the SB-26 on 1/2 power and for the on-axis fill used my SB-400 covered with a plastic Country Time Lemonade container over it as a diffuser. (The lemonade now resides in a Zip-Loc bag in a kitchen cabinet.) The point is to throw some light to soften the shadows created by the main light. Now, David Hobby uses a ring light as his on-axis flash. I don’t have a ring light. I’m not even sure I know what a ring light is. I had to make do with my DIY rig.
Since I was at my parents’ house in the middle of nowhere Kansas this weekend, I thought it prudent to try a star trails shot with the new camera. Star trails by themselves are pretty cool, but it’s the foreground that usually makes such shots really cool. The best thing I could find nearby were some hay bales.
Though I was really pretty far out in the country, the house has a big street light in the yard and there’s a church about 300 yards from the house with its own big street light. In addition, the small town of Parsons is about five miles away. It was actually hard to find a suitably dark piece of sky without a big street light in the way. Straight up was nice with a ton of stars, but I couldn’t get anything in the foreground with the camera pointed straight up.
What I ended up with was the hay bales with the lights of town behind them and the big light from the church shining on their fronts. That’s why they are that green color. I guess the light was florescent or sodium vapor or something. I shot on daylight white balance in raw and I tweaked it a little in CS3. Exposure was f/10 for about 30 minutes.
To round out our family weekend in Little Rock, we went to the zoo on Sunday. I’m not a big fan of zoos. I’m not generally a big believer in animal rights or that animals should be treated the same as people. Zoos just seem to be against the natural order of things. Take this chimp for instance. He’s got about a half acre of brambles and general Arkansas underbrush in which to roam and that telephone-pole jungle gym apparatus to swing on. Zoo workers throw a bunch of bananas out for him to eat each day on a concrete slab. Pretty boring compared to a real jungle. He probably sits up there every day staring over the fence wondering what the jungle south of I-630 is like. I’d rather watch a TV show about chimps filmed in the Congo than watch this poor guy sitting atop a recycled power pole.
We worked in a road trip to Little Rock over the weekend and hit the Arkansas State Fair on its last night. Gina rode the merry-go-round with Abby and Brayden, who is the son of our good friend Jim. Jim is also known as Tater for his well-publicized love of, well, taters. Abby laughed maniacally as she went round and round. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a very good shot of them as they came around. The thing was going about a hundred miles an hour and the horses jumping up and down like they do.
We were just having a little fun after supper.
The annual Mule Jump in Pea Ridge is truly something everyone should see once. Once will do it. Mule jumps draw the kinds of crowds you’d expect. Very few of your urbane types, unless they came up from Fayetteville to see how they live in the provinces.
Abby enjoyed the mules, the funnel cake and the clapping from the crowd.
A couple of dcoumentary film makers saw the above photo on Flickr and contacted me about buying it to put on a DVD cover of a film about the Buffalo River. I quoted them a price and they took it. Isn’t that weird?
That’s my dad standing on Hawksbill Crag in the Upper Buffalo Wilderness.
If you’ll look at the bottom of the sidebar you’ll notice that the ol’ Post Irony is up to 5,000 hits. It’s amazing that just five people have looked at this thing so many times.