I caught you a partridge, but I eated it
In case you don’t get the reference in the post title, it’s this internet meme.
A veterinarian friend of mine is holding a 12 Days of Petmas roundup on her blog, and I volunteered to take Day 4 (4 calling birds, in case you don’t remember the song.) So this evening I decided to take some pictures… I’m not sending her this one, but it’s my favorite of the outtakes… The aftermath.
Cat + Christmas Tree = bad news. The white thing he's munching on is a twin of the white bird in the foreground.
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So much for that partridge in a pear tree.
Beautiful Baby
A couple of things of note:
1.) I actually wrote this post last week, but it broke my website, so I took it down.
Well, it didn’t really break my website, but it broke the HTML, and everything was displaying all wonky. So I spent two hours beating my head against the wall and getting nowhere before finally giving up and writing the darn thing in Windows Notepad. Yaaay 1993. :-p
2.) While I’m writing this post on Thursday evening, you’ll actually be reading it Friday evening or later (I have it queued to autopost on Friday evening), when I’ll be on my first of the four legs of my trip to Rome! Whoohooo!! I’m taking my laptop, so I do plan to post at least a few pictures while I’m there. I’m going with two of my most favorite non-family-members ever — John and Joel! So if you see two weird guys in my picture, John’s the dark-haired one and Joel’s the towhead. And since I have two companions on this trip, maybe I’ll even get myself in a picture or two. :-)
Anyway, these pictures are from a fairly short photo shoot I did of a coworker’s granddaughter this past May — I’m still working on getting my backlog of pictures from last spring and summer onto this website.
As a sort of experiment, I’m going to post large versions of a few shots I like, and underneath next to somewhere near them I’ll post clickable thumbnails of the same picture edited a couple of different ways with regards to color. I’m kind of partial to the low-saturation and black+whites shots myself (the low-sat ones have kind of an antique look that I really like), but it seems like other people I’ve shown them to prefer the more saturated ones. But this is why I solicit opinions — it’s nice to get a feel for what other people like. :-)
As always, click for larger versions. :-)
Finally finished these pictures
Ok, so I’m a bit more tardy than I said I’d be on getting the rest of the pictures posted that I took of my coworker’s daughter. (Yes Kristie, those Annie pics are next on my list!) :-) I wanted to be able to put some time into finishing them, and I finally had that time today, and I’m pretty darn happy overall with how they turned out. Here’s a few more, and click here if you want to see the gallery with all of the pictures in it.
Bored of the whole process already
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Loving hands
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Curled up in her daddy's arm
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Daddy's girl
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Look what the Easter bunny brought!
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Mama's hand
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Teensy eensy baby
Today I ventured out in the pouring rain to take pictures of the newborn daughter of one of my coworkers. Sydnee arrived on March 27th, a couple days short of month early (Amy, correct me if I’m off on that) and was not quite five pounds at birth. She’s the tiniest baby I think I’ve ever held, and it’s hard not to get all squishy at something that little and cute.
As a result of my squishiness, and her cuteness, I took way too many pictures… 822, to be exact. Whoops. So the following pictures are a few I pulled out so that y’all could see an absolutely beautiful girl, and I’ll have to finish narrowing them down (I’ve got it down to 150 now, and I’m shooting for no more than 40 total) and post the rest when I get back from visiting my family this weekend.
Sydnee and her parents
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Sydnee and her mom
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Daddy's girl
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Teensy feet
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The Easter bunny came a bit early this year!
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Sleeping
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Weekend fun: Sierra-at-Tahoe
Yesterday I met up with a coworker’s son, and we went up to Sierra-at-Tahoe to go skiing (me) and snowboarding (him). He’s a senior in high school this year, and his mom asked me to get some good pictures of him for a senior-picture type thing, and she paid for my lift ticket and rentals.
Well, I didn’t get in as much skiing as I’d planned… In fact, I really didn’t ski a whole lot. Part of it is that I was really tired yesterday (was out late on Friday) and I’m pretty out of skiing shape, and I also kinda sorta was going too fast and did a cartwheeling faceplant downhill into the mountain on my third run, which left me quite bruised and sore (and I’m still hurting today. Whoops.) But mostly, I was having a heck of an awesome time taking pictures of skiiers and snowboarders.
Tomorrow’s post will be with pictures that I took of other people, but for Laura today, here’s some of the pictures of her son. Click here for a gallery of all the pictures.
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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