Abby’s Mimi and Meemaw (I think we’ve just about used up all the cutesy-itsy names for the grandparents. We’ve also got Nana, Gramps and Pawpaw) came for a visit over the weekend. It was Meemaw’s 91st birthday and she got a pretty good haul of presents. Gina got her a purse with a light inside that comes on like when you open the refrigerator door.
Abby’s Mimi got Abby a Snow White camping set for her birthday. The set has a sleeping bag, tent, backpack and water bottle. Gina set up the tent today and Abby loved it. Abby found it hysterical when Gina would hit the inside of the tent and make it billow out. It gave me a chance to practice a little Strobistry. A put one flash inside the tent at 1/8 power pointed at Gina’s face and another flash with the umbrella reflector outside the tent at full power pointed at Abby. I think it turned out pretty well.
We woke up to a death in the family on Sunday. Our plecostomus was lying motionless on the bottom of the tank. I don’t know how long he was dead, because I don’t remember noticing him moving for the last few days. Gina said she saw him alive Friday night. Abby was less than devastated. She said, “It’s gross!”
The garage is turning out to be a pretty good photo studio. It’s nice for Abby because the mosquitoes aren’t as bad in there as they are in the back yard. I gave Abby the white-background treatment like I did Gina the night before. (See those on Flickr.) Then we put the bubble grill in there and Abby went crazy rubbing the bubble elixir all over her arms and legs.
We’re digging this at the Dailey house.
Our cable has a new channel called Retro Television that carries a lot of old TV shows and we discovered a couple of weeks ago that the classic Johnny Depp series comes on at 8 every night. The show began in 1987, the year Gina and I graduated high school and it was pretty cutting edge at the time. It was on the new Fox network, which had a rep of airing gritty or tasteless fare. I didn’t watch many episodes during the first run, but it made quite a splash among the young and hip.
This is the 10,000th shot on my Nikon D40 I bought back in November. (The camera started over with the numbering at 0001. It skipped 0000. The first shot started at 0001, of course, and the camera isn’t smart enough to know that this wasn’t the very first shot.) I bought it to take pics of Abby, mostly. Our little digital point and shoot was getting outdated and I wanted something a little more flexible. I didn’t realize that the DSLR would reignite my latent interest in photography. I’m looking forward to the next 10,000.
Gina found a tiny toad in the back yard and we took Abby out to see it. I put it in her hand and it kept jumping onto the ground in an attempt to flee. Abby would yell, “COME BACK TOAD!”
Then she gave it a kiss. It didn’t turn into a prince, though.
Today we let Abby run around without a diaper again in the hope for a repeat potty performance. Well she went in there, sat on her little potty and POOPED! We danced for joy again. But poop is a lot grosser in that little potty than pee.
Here’s a twofer for Abby Monday.
Sunday was a red-letter day for us. We’ve been sorta encouraging Abby to use the potty with little luck. But she was saying she had to pee, and Gina let her run around sans diaper to see what would happen. Generally when she gets loose in the house without a diaper she pees on the floor. Once she even pooped on the floor in the laundry room.
Gina was messing around in the bathroom when Abby walked in and sat on her tiny blue potty. She does that sometimes and Gina didn’t think anything of it. Directly, Abby says I pee-peed. Gina skeptically leaned over and looked in and what do you know, she actually had peed. You can imagine the dance of joy we all performed.
This morning when I was taking Abby to school, I said to her, “Remember yesterday when you peed in the potty?” She replied,”Yeah, my Daddy proud of me. My Mommy proud of me.” And so we were.
I’m going off the deep end with this photography thing. There’s this blog by a guy who calls himself the Strobist and I fell for his schtick. I bought a Strobist-approved off-camera light kit that consists of a flash, an umbrella, a cheap set of radio-wave-powered flash triggers and other assorted flash-photography crap. It was my Father’s Day gift to myself.
The Strobist has two programs of exercises designed to teach the fledgling strobist how to use small flashes to create fabulous pictures. They’re quite interesting to dorks like me and, best of all, they’re free. I’ve decided to run through the programs and post the pictures on the blog here. (What the hell else am I gonna do with them.)
All over Flickr you can see photos with these little notes on them: “Strobist info: 580ex into 6×6 softbox camera right, Vivitar 285 HV with gridspot camera left and behind model to light hair, SB26 camera left in shoot-through umbrella at 1/64 for fill and golden foam core just below chin to reflect some golden goodness onto the face.”
The first assignment in the Strobist Bootcamp program is a headshot. I drafted Gina into helping me with this one. She’s really loving it, too, let me tell ya. She might be in for a rude awakening because she’s the only model I really have a chance of lining up to help me.
I used a Strobist suggestion on shooting heads in the corner of a room. The model was seated with a wall to her back just out of the frame. The flash fired at 1/4 power into a silver reflective umbrella at about 45 degrees on camera right. The idea is to use the wall behind the model as a clean background and the wall to the side to reflect some light onto the shadow side of the face. I tweaked the white balance in CS3 and sharpened for the Web.
I like the bottom pose better, but she’s sitting too close to the wall, I think.
I turned the camera over to Gina so she could get in on the fun. I think it looks pretty good considering the glistening skin and the funky hair, courtesy of an earlier treadmill session. I could have used the shot for the yearbook in 1987, except without the wrinkles and with more acne. Oh, and a much lower hairline. And a less fat face. And … oh you get the idea.
