It’s Abby Monday. She’s about to lose a top tooth and starting to look a little snaggley, kinda like Jewel.
Back when I got into the digital photography I did some drop photos using milk. I always meant to try it again, so now that I have a real macro lens I looked up how to do it on the Internets and I did it. It’s a tedious project. It’s out of my system now and I can move on.
I finally got around to getting some pictures of Abby in her dancing togs.
Strobist: SB600 on floor fired through shoot-thru umbrella. SB600 in shoot-thru pointed down from above.
(Note: I know the vignette is too strong making the edges of the photo blend into the blog background, but I don’t feel like fixing it.)
Abby has come a long way since she first rode the springy horse two years ago. In the beginning, we had to put her up on the thing and tell her to hold on. The other day she just grabbed her cowboy hat, jumped up on there and started yelling “yee-haw!” Strobist info for the top pic: SB-600 in silver reflective umbrella at 1/2 power camera left and SB-26 fired into the ceiling for fill at probably 1/2 power. The bottom photo was lit with an SB-400 on the camera probably fired into the ceiling on auto an sunlight through a window on camera right.
For you photographers, the Today Show profiled the little town where my parents live. It’s home to the last lab processing the iconic Kodachrome slide film.
I don’t know. She was making some kind of fish face.
When I was a young’n, just about every weekend I would go with my Dad to my Grandma’s place in DeQueen, where I would be made to do all sorts of slave labor. One of the main things I would slave away at was mowing the vast lawns on her 3 acres during the summer. I actually kind of enjoyed the mowing. Grandma had a lawn tractor, so it wasn’t particularly strenuous, and I’d do a lot of good thinking while mowing. It sure beat the hell out of cutting firewood, the other main chore I was forced to participate in. You can’t think well and load firewood at the same time.
The best part of mowing, however, took place for only a few weeks during June when the wild plums were ripe. Grandma had a couple of wild-plum thickets on her place and few free-standing plum bushes. Every time I’d pass a thicket or a bush, I’d get a big handful of plums and eat them while I mowed. Grandma would also make jelly out of those plums. The best jelly I’ve ever had.
Gina wanted to get some pictures of Abby in honor of her reaching the milestone of becoming 3 years old, so we headed out to the little historic homesteader cabin at Burns Park with my picher takin stuff. This is some of what we came back with.
Abby’s Gramps gave her a fishing rod on Easter and she had a big time fishing in the bathtub. When we got home she wanted a fishing rod at her house so she could fish in her own bathtub. So the next week we got her a Barbie fishing rod and tiny tackle box at Wal-Mart. I was looking beyond the bathtub, so I also got some hooks, bobbers and split-shot sinkers.
In order to go fishing for real, you’ve got to get a tin can and go dig up some worms in the back yard. She found digging worms enjoyable and we found quite a few, though they were small.
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.