Monthly Archives: April 2009

I had some intentions to take pictures today.  Really.  I just ended up not doing it.  Sorry.

Sometime in the next month or so, our backyard will be transformed…

Again…

A little more than two years ago, the previous owners of our home left us a nice, quiet, tranquil english-gardeny backyard.  There was a two tier fountain, a raised flowerbed, pea-sized gravel everywhere…and stones.  Lots and lots of stones.  Granted, a year of minimal neglect while the house was on the market and not actively lived in had added a bit of straggledy-ness to the whole set up, but still nice.

Two years later, my lack of experience and time had added a bit more wear and tear on the backyard.  With a little bit of effort, it could have been fixed up.

Had we not had a toddler running around the house.  There comes a moment in every parents life, however fleeting that moment might be, when otherwise sane adults look out their windows and think to themselves, “Yes, it’s negative 20 degrees outside and the snow is a foot deep and I might have possibly seen a polar bear out there somewhere…but the kids have been inside for three…months.”

Wanting a kid to be outside (presumably in non-lethal weather) puts an onus on parents.  We must make sure that any and all choking hazards (pea-sized gravel) are removed and dangerous, unstable elements (large stones) are carefully put away.

So we tore up our garden.  We lifted out all the stones, picked up all the junk, broke down the fountain.

And now…now we’re paying someone to finish the job.  Sometime in the next month or so, a landscaping company will come in, dig up all the crappy soil, put in better soil, and lay down some sod.

And a month after that, our daughter will finally get kicked out of the damn house.

It’s all about the peace and quiet folks.  All about the peace and quiet.

Ok, I really didn’t intend to let a whole day go by without another post.

Heck, I even took pictures yesterday, intending to find one good enough to post.

In fact, if our neighbors on the right happened to be walking down their driveway and happened to glance at the large picture window that happens to look into our dining room and kitchen, they would have seen me crouched over the sink, camera in hand, focusing intensely on the faucet, gleefully snapping pictures away.  Hopefully they would have had the deceny to look away at that point.

I was hunched over my sink in a vain attempt to capture that moment when a drop of water seperates from the stream and becomes that perfect little ball of water as it surrenders gracefully to gravity.

I discovered that that’s a hard thing to do.  I can say that as it took me the better part of an hour to take all the pictures.  And then another 30 minutes to toss all but a handful of the images.  One or two managed to get close to what I wanted to capture.

Byt the time all was said and done, it was nearly 10 in the evening.  And that’s my cut off point.

Grabbing that single moment of movement is hard.  Especially indoors, where you have to rely on your flash.  Depending on the charge of your battery, the flash may or may not keep up.

So I really was going to post last night.  And then I figured I would just post first thing this morning, before I started in on work.

And then Charter had a 5 hour internet outage.

So…there you go.

Oh, in case you’re wondering whether or not pictures were taken today, there were.  But they were taken by AM.  And I had forgotten to take off Manual focus, so they were all out of focus.

So no luck there.

No new pictures were taken today.  Just so you know.  Just so you’re not wondering why there wasn’t the little expandable option picture.

Actually it’s a bit of a problem

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m trying to keep up with the weekly assignments at the Digital Photography School.  Unlike the first week’s assignment, which was an exploration of Shallow Depth of Field, this week’s assignment has less to do with a physical technique of photography where you learn to take a picture better, and more to do with creating a story out of your picture (taking a better picture as it were).  I’m supposed to take a picture in the Theme of “Wisdom”.  I have an idea.  I hope it works.  The problem is that I actually have to leave my home with my camera in hand and go to the spot where I’d take the picture.

It’s a big problem.

I had thought to try and get over to my spot at some point over the weekend.  Give that it’s nearly 9:00 pm on a Sunday, you can guess how well that turned out.  Now, my only option is to try over my lunch break.

I cherish my lunch break.  It’s nearly sacred to me.  It’s a time where I don’t have to get up and do something for someone else.  It’s just for me.

And yes, I know that taking this picture is just for me.  And furthermore, I know that the place where I’d take the picture is maybe 5 minutes away by car.  If that.

Basically I’m lazy.

Hey, at least I acknowledge it.

There was a moment today where I looked at a clock on the wall and spent several minutes trying to figure out just how it was possible that it was two in the afternoon.

I mean, it just wasn’t possible.  It had to be 10, 10:30…max.

No, it was actually two.  Today flew by.  I couldn’t tell you why.  Given how early my daughter woke up, it should have dragged along.  Somehow a lazy Saturday was over halfway done before I could really get into it.

It could have been the chunk of time I spent picking up some stuff from the store.  Or it could have been my dog’s brief jaunt through the neighborhood after exploited an as-yet undiscovered hole in the fence.  It could have been the time I spent outside patching said hole.  It might have been the walk to and from the library, with a stop at the diner nearby for lunch.

Or it might have been a hole in the space-time continuum.  Who knows?

The point is…the days almost over, and I’m not really sure how it happened.

One post on a blog linked to Twitter snags two followers on Twitter.

Suddenly I simultaneously feel popular and understand what all the jokes about twitter are about.

I am twitting.

Yeah…I know.  And I know what it makes me.  Deal with it.

It seems like most of my media consumption comes from non-traditional sources these days.  I’m never watching what the Networks want me to be watching when they want me to be watching it.

I am an avid fan of Netflix.  Currently I’m on Season 2 of The Wire.  Yeah, sure I’m behind the rest of the hard core fans who paid out who knows how much money each month to HBO for the privelege of watching the show each time it aired.  But who cares?

Also, though I don’t have a DVR (much to the surprise and consertnation of my friends and family), I do manage to do a fair bit of time-shifting of television using services such as Hulu.  Heck, there’s so much content out there that there’s a movement afoot for people to ditch TV  signal altogther (be it by cable or by satellite) and just buy a beefy internet pipe.  Every once in a while I’m tempted to join in.  But I don’t know that I’m ready to give it all over just yet.

Of course, the downside to all of this is that instead of missing shows due to a certain pint-sized powerhouse, I’m piling up shows that I need to watch.  I’ve got two discs from Netflix sitting on top of my TV.  I’ve got 4 shows in my Hulu queue.   I’m almost drowning in content.

What’s a person to do?

So I’ve spent the last 40 minutes casting about for ideas for the next “assignment” on Digital Photography School.  The theme this week is “Wisdom”.  I’ve got some ideas now, but nothing I can take pictures of.  I didn’t want to do anything too staged.  There are a few pictures of books in various positions on the thread already.  I did think about the timeless wisdom in a child’s eyes, and I do have several pictures where Micah is peering deep into your soul on my machine.  The catch is that you have to have taken the picture during the assignment period and Micah’s already asleep.  Ish.  Mostly asleep.  A little bit awake.  But it’s late, so let’s pretend I don’t hear her playing with her dolls.

I’m looking around the living room when the fireplace kicks on.  When we first moved into our house, we purchased a fancy new wood-pellet burning stove insert for our non-functional fireplace.   It’s super fancy and efficient.  Heck, it has it’s own thermostat and automatically turns on and off when the ambient temperature of the room reaches the right point.  (If only it could haul the 40 lb bags out of the basement when the hopper runs low.)  It’s basically a pellet-burning furnace that you put in your living room, but nice to look at.

As I said, the fireplace kicked on.  It’s Wisconsin, so the evenings are still cold.   As are some of the days, even in the “spring time”.

I looked at the flames and I thought:  I wonder if I could photograph that.  With a little bit of trial and error and the eventual drift out of “Aperture Priority Mode” into “Shutter Priority Mode”, I was able to catch the flames as they danced out of the firepot.

I got a couple of good shots, one of which I included at the top of this post.  I like to look at the images and try to find the pattern.  In this one I see a rose.  Or maybe a reclining lady.

This is pretty cool, if I do say so myself.