Wide angle fun, day 1: Inside my house
For the next two weeks, I’m renting a Canon 10-22mm wide angle lens from LensRentals.com. I’m doing this for a couple of reasons. First, a friend of mine told me that I need to quit focusing in on details of stuff and try zooming out and looking at the big picture for a change. I retorted that I don’t have a decent wide-angle lens, so that’s why I always go for the details… but he’s right–I was starting to get stuck in a rut there, more or less. Reason #2 is a photo outing that will make itself known after this weekend, but I’ll wait until I have pictures to post before I explain further. :-)
Anyway, so I spent today at work obsessively clicking F5 on the FedEx tracking page, and then I got home to find the lovely lens waiting for me. I immediately popped it on my camera and looked around for a subject. Ok, so my house isn’t all that clean, but these are the best pictures I’ve manged to get thus far (given that my place is tiny and normally everything gets cut off.)
My living room. Ignore the clutter--it's laundry day, and I need to put stuff away.
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My kitchen, with a quite lovely chicken-and-dumplings soup stewing in the crock pot.
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My bedroom--somewhat messy, but cozy nonetheless.
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My favorite place to hang out.
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Last but not least, I tried to get one of those pictures where the animal’s nose looks huge because it’s up close to the lens, but Stein would have none of it, and this is as close as I managed to get. Dumb cat.
Stein the cat.
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Same thing every morning
This is generally the first thing I see when I open my eyes every morning.
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Saturday night fun
Last night I went to Scandia with some friends for mini golf and air hockey. By my recollection, it’s been almost 12 years since I’ve played mini golf, so I was more than a bit rusty, but at least I kicked butt at air hockey to make up for my poor golf performance.
Their signs amused me. Find the two funnies on this one (hint--think heaven and piranhas...)
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Another funny sign. Nothing like a good curse to deter theft.
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Like I said, I'm a bad golfer. (I'm the one on the far left.)
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Fun with a long exposure and the windmill hole.
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More long exposure fun--the Scandia Screamer ride (no, I didn't go on it.)
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Finally, something I *am* good at--air hockey!
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Pick a direction
I pass this street sign on the way to work every day, and it never fails to amuse me. Hey, what can I say–I’m easily amused. One of these days I’ll get one of my other favorite street sign–the intersection of Elvas and Elvas.
Confusing street sign
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I miss Italy
The brightly-colored stucco of the house down the street from me makes me really want to go back to Italy. Sigh.
Orange house and a flowering ornamental pear tree.
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Anyone know what these flowers are?
They are covering several lawns and grassy areas around my neighborhood, and I can’t figure out what they are, but I absolutely love them. So pretty!! As always, click on the picture to enlarge it. :-)
Unidentified flowers--help me out here!
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A day at the races
Ok, so I was there in the evening, I was only there for a bit, and there were no Marx Brothers anywhere to be seen. But it was $1 hot dog night at Cal Expo, and there were horses to take pictures of, so despite the brisk, chilly wind, I hung out next to the track fence and had fun shooting the horses taking pictures.
If you've never seen a harness race, they use a mobile starting gate. I don't know why, but every one I remember seeing has been attached to a Cadillac, which I find oddly amusing.
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View from behind the gate
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This ended up being a photo finish. The horse closest to the camera won.
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The reason I went, besides that it was $1 hot dog night, was because I was invited by some friends of mine. One of them has a coworker whose daughter owns Mack N Black, the horse in the following picture. Click on this link to read more about her and her horse–it’s a neat story!
Flying horse. This was a split second after he crossed the finish line. He won.
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Click here for a gallery of more pictures
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Mmmm… chocolate…
Bowl of M&Ms on the counter at the University Art Store in downtown Sac
Arty goodness
I just happened to be wandering around town with my camera when I stumbled upon University Art Store‘s huge sidewalk sale. Now, I’m about the least artistic person ever, but I will always appreciate the loveliness of neatly arranged and colorful art supplies. They were awesome and didn’t mind me taking pictures (as the person I asked said, “It’s a free country, isn’t it?” I wish more people were that easy-going!) so I spent a happy hour wandering around peering at displays of colored pencils and other random stuff. My only regret was that I only brought one lens with me, and it wasn’t my 100mm macro. Alas.
Pretty pretty color pencils
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Scrapbook rainbow
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Fun with their fisheye mirror. I didn't crop it so that you could see what it was, but click on the picture to zoom in--there's a lot more detail than meets the eye!
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One of the photo challenges for this month is "green". I wanted to be a bit creative, so I've been trying to think of green things that aren't actually organic. This fits the bill quite nicely!
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[Click here for a gallery of more pictures]
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Linemen
I was driving home from that photo session last Saturday, and doubled back to get a closer look at these guys. Neat.
PG&E linemen.
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I really want to know what the deal was with the horizontally-suspended telephone poles. If you know, drop me a comment--I'm curious!
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I’m still learning
This past weekend I got to go out and take pictures of a coworker’s granddaughter at a Sacramento-area park. The weather was beautiful (breezy and a bit cold, but still lovely) and the little girl was full of life and smiles. I went to Target and got a few inexpensive fun props to play with (a ball, a book, and a teddy bear) and then went out and had a TON of fun taking pictures. I looked at everything on the back of the camera… Beautiful. Totally awesome.
And then I got home. On my way into my house, I decided to stop in the neighbor’s yard–there’s been a couple of flowers that I’ve been meaning to take a picture of and kept forgetting to. I flipped on my camera and the back display came on automatically. Normally, I turn it off immediately to save battery, but this time I just happened to glance at it before I pushed the button to turn it off.
The ISO said 1600.
If you’re not familiar with ISO or the concept of film speed, let me quickly sum up. ISO is a measurement of how sensitive a piece of photographic film (or a digital camera sensor) is to light. The ISO on my camera ranges from 100 (the slowest) to 1600 (the fastest.) Typically, on a sunny day (like Saturday) shooting outdoors, one would shoot at ISO 100–there’s plenty of light to work with, so a slow film speed will allow nice, sharp, non-grainy pictures with good color saturation. Shooting at a faster ISO is good for lower-light situations or any time where you might need a faster shutter speed, because the pictures won’t come out (as) underexposed or blurry. The tradeoff, however, is that for the shutter speed to be able to go faster, the camera’s sensor can’t save as much information, and so the pictures lose saturation and come out grainy. While saturation is something that can be bumped up in post-processing, when the sensor doesn’t record as many colors to begin with, there’s just not much to work with, and so the color just isn’t as nice.
So anyway, yeah. ISO was set to 1600. Ever get that sinking feeling in your stomach, like you’re not sure if you want to cry or barf? Yeah, that was me. Literally, I got really cold all of a sudden. It’s not like this was a huge deal, but I’d had such a good time, and the pictures looked so great on the (teensy tiny) screen on the back of my camera, that this was a HUGE shock. Frantically I scrolled backwards through the pictures, and the feeling got worse. 100… 200… 300… I’d filled up the entire memory card (over 400 shots) from the morning’s session, and over 300 of them were at the wrong ISO.
Later on I figured out what’d happened. The button to change the ISO sits right in an area where it’s easy to bump it with my thumb. The first time you push it, it brings up the ISO menu. The second time you push it, it goes back one item in the ISO menu. Since 100 is the lowest and that’s what I had it set at, it went back to the end of the list, which is ISO 1600.
I went through quite a few emotions over the next 30 minutes or so, including door-slamming anger and mentally beating myself up for being so stupid as to not check my settings and notice. I mean, even if I keep the back display shut off, every.single.time I look through the viewfinder, the shutter speed is staring me in the face… It would have been a big fat clue, had I paid any attention to it.
Sigh. Live and learn, right? That’s what I figure, anyway. I know anyone who takes enough pictures pulls something like that sooner or later. So hopefully from now on I’ll be more paranoid/vigilant about that… because that just sucked. Oh, and I also managed to bump up the aperture (from 4 to 9) without noticing. I’d explain how I managed that one (I figured that out too), but it’s really not worth the explanation. Just another lame mistake.
Anyway, time for the fun part–some of the pictures, with a link to the gallery at the end of this post.
These first two are from before I messed up the ISO.
Smiley girl
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I love her impish face. She was having so much fun with the ball!
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The next ones are after I switched over to 1600. Notice that while the colors are bright, they’re much more contrasty, and the pictures themselves are rather grainy.
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Flower child. :-)
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Chomping on the ball...
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...and the bear...
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Happy little girl giggles
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Little feet
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Grandma snuggles. I think that of all of the pictures, this is my favorite one. :-)
[Click here for a gallery of more pictures]
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Ladybug!
The other day after I finished taking pictures of the CDF CalFire planes, I went to get back into my truck and was distracted by movement and color in the dirt. Now, I tend to get distracted fairly easily (and those of you who know me are going, “Gee, ya THINK?”) so within a minute (and after a quick lens change) I was on my belly in the dirt, taking pictures of the ladybug that had caught my attention.
Look--it has a heart! I didn't even notice this until I got the picture onto my computer. So cool.
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I like the angle on this one.
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One more picture.
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Ooooh, shiny
When McClellan Air Force Base was closed, the buildings on the base were sold to a corporation that turned it into McClellan Park, a huge office complex. No, seriously, it’s big–it has its own hotel and several housing complexes. Remember, this used to be an entire airbase.
Anyway, one of the bigger employers there is SureWest, a telecommunications company. They have what is without a doubt the most interesting-looking building on base (which is how everyone refers to McClellan Park, even though it’s technically not a base anymore.) I somehow don’t think it looked like this when it was still an active air base.
Front of the SureWest building in McClellan Park. The windows are coated with some colorful reflective coating--it's so so neat!
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Oooh, shiny
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Tree reflections
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Planes, trains, and… ok, just planes
My work is located on the former McClellan Air Force Base, a decommissioned USAF base located a handful of miles from downtown Sacramento. While the base was shuttered in 2001, McClellan Airfield is open for civilian use, and houses, among other things, planes for the California Department of Forestry, which used to go by the acronym CDF but now is called CalFire, for some reason (apparently that’s… shorter to say than CDF? I have no idea.)
Anyway, I finally got around to bringing my camera with me and going to take pictures of the planes, just because I find most modes of transportation quite fascinating (hence my minor obsession with trains that a few people have commented on.)
I spent a long time trying to figure out how to crop this one, and then gave up. You’re just going to have to settle for the panoramic shot. Horrible, I know. Sorry about how weird it makes the page’s formatting–you’ll just have to click on it to go to Flickr and see the whole thing.
CalFire planes on the tarmac at McClellan Field.
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[Hums] “One of these things is not like the other; one of these things doesn’t belong…”
Hangars at McClellan Airfield.
Lovely spring blossoms
By the calendar, spring starts in another week, but if you looked at the thermometer and flowering trees, you’d swear it’s been here for longer than that. Lately it seems like everything around here is in bloom, something which my allergies are none too happy about… But I do have to admit that I’m just as obsessed with flowering trees in the spring as I am fall colors in the autumn, so I take my allergy medicine and enjoy the beauty. (Note to a certain whiner–I didn’t adjust the saturation on this at all. The lens just does really rock that much.)
Ornamental pear blossoms. The tree smells like wet dog (to me, anyway, but I'm just weird) but the darn things sure are beautiful.
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Seen on my way to work
Random 001, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie.
I know those of you who live in climates where it snows in the winter are probably laughing at me right about now, but keep in mind that I’m a native Southern Californian, so driving to work and seeing snow-covered mountains (even if they are a 75-mile drive from here) is still amazing and awesome to me. I love it. :-)
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Welcome to California
Take a minute to look at the lovely tranquil scene… people camping in a green field late in the golden sunlight of late afternoon. Peaceful, no?
Tents in a meadow.
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For no reason other than literary promotion, I’ve decided to share with you some excerpts from Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Or wait, maybe I did have a reason. In any case, if you want to read the whole chapter the following excerpts are from, click on this link (warning – it’s a PDF file.)
The little farmers watched debt creep up on them like the tide. They sprayed the trees and sold no crop, they pruned and grafted and could not pick the crop. And the men of knowledge have worked, have considered, and the fruit is rotting on the ground, and the decaying mash in the wine vats is poisoning the air…
Let’s zoom out a bit on that earlier scene, shall we? Same golden afternoon. I decided to take advantage of the fact that, because of the time change, it’s now still light out when I get home from work, so I set out to watch the sun set over the Sacramento skyline (and hopefully take a lovely sunset picture.)
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This is a tent camp three blocks from my house, located off of the Sacramento Northern Bikeway near the American River and downtown Sacramento. That's the Blue Diamond Almond Factory in the background.
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This little orchard will be a part of a great holding next year, for the debt will have choked the owner.
This vineyard will belong to the bank. Only the great owners can survive, for they own the canneries too. And four pears peeled and cut in half, cooked and canned, still cost fifteen cents. And the canned pears do not spoil. They will last for years.
More tents on the left.
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The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hands over the State like a great sorrow. The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up…
Click on this one for the larger version. I was just up on this hill a few months ago and this wasn't here.
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A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene spayed over the golden mountains.
And the smell of rot fills the country.
More tents.
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There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
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Here’s a link to a photo gallery of a 1936 tent city in the EXACT SAME PLACE.
In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
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In case you’re curious, here are a bunch more links, including an MSNBC photo essay on this exact tent city.
- MSNBC photo essay
- Blog post
- Oprah talks about them
- UK Telegraph article
- UK Daily Mirror article
- Calculating unemployment stats accurately
- California’s surging unemployment
- Local news article
- Another blog post
- Still another blog post
- One last blog post
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Apple tree
This tree is right across the street from my house, and I often park in front of it. Last summer I discovered that parking in front of (read: underneath it!) it inevitably meant I’d get onto the freeway and hear thunking sounds as the apples that fell off the tree into the bed of my truck would roll around and get bruised. Then, if I forgot to take them out, they’d cook on the bedliner in the hot summer sun, and my truck would smell like apple cider.
There are worse things in life. :-)
Flowering apple tree.
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Cameraphone roundup – working backwards
While I wasn’t all that thrilled about the time change this morning, the fact that it’s sunny makes it so much nicer. This window is right behind my desk at work, and when I got here this morning, I stood for a while with my face turned up to the sun and my eyes closed, just enjoying the feeling of the warm sun on my face, glowing through my eyelids.
Sun through the window at work
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Last night’s trivia round was “moderately hard”, according to the Trivia Master, but the questions led one team to name themselves “Moderately Hard, My Ass”. The questions killed us, and as a result we did uncharacteristically poorly (not helped by the fact that I second-guessed myself on two questions and so we missed them both!) So as a consolation, we decided to stick around and play darts. As a side note, if anyone knows someone in Sacramento who has a strong sports knowledge, we’ll buy ‘em beer if they want to be on our trivia team. We have a major hole in the sports knowledge department… Guess that’s what happens when you get a bunch of geeks together.
My trivia team: "Drinkers With a Trivia Problem"
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Yesterday I went skiing again (I have two more free passes left, and then a coworker is going to give me one for taking senior pictures of her son, so I’m pretty set for what’s left of winter.) It was kind of a lousy skiing day, all things considered – the time change (ok, and a late Friday/Saturday night) left me groggy, I got on the road late, got to the cheap rental place late and they were out of my size skis and poles, I ended up standing in a long line to rent poles at the slope because the ones I had just weren’t going to work, it was a lot colder than I thought it was going to be, and to top it all off, then I decided I’d try something different, and after I got stuck and had to take my skis off to walk out, I ended up getting stuck almost waist-deep in the snow. Bad bad move. However, at least I got to be outside on a very lovely (albeit cold!) day, and I got a change of scenery.
In Spanish, "Sierra Nevada" means "snowy saw". Quite apt, eh?
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