Family Fun – Page 7

This Is A Big Dam Bridge

By Don on Saturday, December 20, 2008

Day 5 of the Atay-At-Home-Dad Experiment dawned bright and warm. Hallelujah! After another round with the cable company, Abby and I set out to see the other end of the Little Rock River Trail. The pedestrian bridge over the Murray Lock and Dam is the centerpiece of this part of the trail.

We got to the top in time to watch a barge lock through to the upstream side of the dam. Abby nearly had a tiny heart attack when the big horn blew to signal the opening of the lock, but later when we had made it back to the truck she said, “I was brave when the boat made that loud noise.”

Adventures in Strobistry Family Fun Photography Thanksgiving feast

Turkey Day

By Don on Thursday, November 27, 2008

We hosted a Thanksgiving feast for Gina’s parents, my Dad and my Grandma, the star of an earlier post. I used a brining recipe from Alton Brown of Good Eats fame and it turned out marvelous. It was the third or fourth time I’ve brined a turkey and it’s the only way to go. In my experience, roasted turkey is generally dry and unappealing. With the brining method the juices flow out of the bird like the Nile River when you hit it with the electric knife.

Abby Family Fun Photography

Confetti

By Don on Wednesday, November 26, 2008

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.

Abby Adventures in Strobistry Family Fun Halloween Photography

All Hallows Eve

By Don on Thursday, October 30, 2008

What with it being Halloween and all, we embarked on some punkin’ carvin’. Abby helped scoop out the innards.

Abby Family Fun Little Rock Zoo Photography

Zootastic

By Don on Tuesday, October 21, 2008

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.

Abby Arkansas State Fair Family Fun Photography

State Fair!

By Don on Tuesday, October 21, 2008

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.

Abby Family Fun

Abby Wednesday

By Don on Wednesday, October 15, 2008

We were just having a little fun after supper.

Arkansas Family Fun Uncategorized

Mules

By Don on Saturday, October 11, 2008

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.

Abby Bikes Blues & BBQ Family Fun Photography

Wild Weekend

By Don on Sunday, September 28, 2008

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 Family Fun Photography

Smiles

By Don on Tuesday, September 23, 2008

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.