Abby had a cookie with blue icing on the way home from school today.
I got a package in the mail that had a huge wad of shredded newspaper inside as packing material and when Abby found it she went nutsy fagan.
I shot these with my 50mm f/1.8 prime at f/4.5 and 1/30. I left the auto ISO on and it jumped around quite a bit. These two shots were at 2200 and 1600 ISO, respectively. We were in the kitchen under the funky flourescent lights, which made the white balance weird in the top photo because the light behind Abby is a different temperature than the light shining on her face. I had to play around with it in Photoshop quite a bit to get it close. I ended up just concentrating on getting her face right and just letting the rest go. That’s why her hair and counter top at the top left are kinda blue-purple.
I was shooting some pics of Abby in the light from the living room window when she picked up these black shoes and worked real hard at putting them on. She got finished and looked down at them and I asked her, “How do they look?” She said, “They look wrong.” I replied, “That’s because they’re on the wrong feet.” So she took them off and ran into the other room to see what her mom was doing.
I can’t get her to ham it up for the camera. This is the look she generally gives me when she notices I’m taking pictures.
What with it being Halloween and all, we embarked on some punkin’ carvin’. Abby helped scoop out the innards.
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.
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.
A woodchuck or groundhog, if you prefer, has moved in under the shed. He comes out into the yard often, but he’s very shy. The slightest movement or noise sends him dashing back to his hole. He dug under the fence so now he’s roaming the neighbor’s yard, too. I don’t know what to. I’m thinking that if he decides to hibernate under the shed we can hold our own Groundhog Day ceremony in February. We’ll just have to find someone willing to crawl under the shed and force the animal out to check for the shadow.
Abby rarely smiles for me when I have the camera out. She likes the picture takin’ and she likes to look at the pics on the bacl of the camera, but she doesn’t like to smile. Tonight we tricked her into smiling while she was in the bathtub.
I wanted to get some shots in the bath because I knew it would test the high ISO limits of the new camera. As ISO goes up, so does the sensors sensitiveness to light. The drawback is that the image gets more noisy with little multicolored blobs everywhere that rob the photo of sharpness and contrast. Camera makers are getting better all the time at combating noise. The top photo was taken at 1200 ISO and the one below at 2500 ISO. The camera picked the ISO for me. Shutter speed was 1/30 so there was some motion blur. The pics are noisy, but they look OK to me. I never wanted my D40 to go above 800, so this is an improvement for me.
Gina takes one on the chin after the bath. I used my SB-26 and 45 inche umbrella at camera right. I fired the flash on slave mode with the pop-up flash on the camera.