Hallelujah, we got a warm day. Abby and I headed to Pinnacle Mountain to fly a kite. Unfortunately, the wind wasn’t blowing much at all. Note the kite laying on the ground. So we spent three hours on the playground see-sawing, sliding and swinging. I was playing around with balancing flash and ambient light. Abby was between the camera and the sun. I exposed for the sky and then fired the flash off camera at Abby’s shadow side.
I’ve been running my new telephoto lens through its paces the last few days. It’s a Nikon 70-300mm VR 4.5/5.6 that got on sale when the Circuit City in Fayetteville went belly up. I got it back at the beginning of December, but hadn’t gotten a chance to really use until last week. It’s really a consumer-type lens so I expected it to be visibly wonky at certain apertures and at the long and short ends of the zoom range. After I bought it, I read Ken Rockwell’s assessment of the lens and started thinking I might have picked up a true bargain. With crop factor on the my camera, this lens is the equivalent of a 105-450mm lens on a 35mm camera frame. That extra reach is nice for those wildlife shots.
The top shot is some sort of gull I shot at the Big Dam Bridge in Little Rock. Those birds gather in great numbers at the Dam and swoop all over and under the bridge so they come in pretty close to you. It was the first time I’d ever tried shooting birds on the wing with a camera. I burned off about 500 frames and only got five shots I felt were usable. They fly pretty fast and when they come in close enough to fill the frame, they are really moving. It’s tough to keep up with them.
It’s Week 4 of the Stay-At-Home Dad Experiment. Yesterday we hit a library in West Little Rock. Today, with the sun out and temperatures much more reasonable, we made it to a couple of parks.
I was experimenting with the 70-300mm lens that I got a bargain on in Circuit City’s liquidation sale in Little Rock. It seems to work decently for portraits and I got a few bird shots a the parks. I think I’ll post a few of those over on Flickr.
We had one of those ice storms today where it was cold enough for the rain to freeze on power lines and BBQ grills and decorative aluminum eagles but not cold enough to freeze on the streets. Icicles make good subjects for shallow-depth-of-field experimentation. Black and white just captures the moment so nicely.
Ice storms in general are hell on stay-at-home dads. Cold rain means staying inside, which means keeping Abby entertained is quite a bit harder. With the holidays over and everyone back at work and out-of-town guests back at home, our options for staying occupied narrowed considerably. We worked on our numbers and letters and she miraculously took a nap.
Gina started breaking down the Christmas tree this evening and I protested, saying we hadn’t shot our annual family Christmas portrait. I use “annual” loosely here. So I got all my pitchure takin’ junk out. In hindsight, it would have been better to think of this earlier in the season. I would have shaved and worn a decent shirt and we would have combed Abby’s hair.
We had us a whole mess of Christmas this year. First, we moved to another city a couple of weeks before the big day. Then for the big day loaded up and went to Branson to see Mimi and PawPaw. That’s where I gave Abby the jack-in-the-box that has apparently been giving her nightmares ever since.
With a contingent of family in town for the Christmas thing, we went to the Flying Fish in the Little Rock River Market district for some lunch. It’s a chain but it has pretty good catfish. I had what the menu calls the catfish poor boy loaf. It was just your regular po’ boy sandwich. I don’t know what the loaf part is all about. I’m a fan of catfish and central Arkansas is loaded with catfish places.
One thing you don’t want to see on your first official day of house husbanding is ice dangling from the eaves. That means you’ll be stuck inside the house with a television-addicted kid. “Can I watch one Dora, please,” is printed on the official seal of the Dailey household.
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.
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.
