My wife and I had a lovely date a few days ago, enjoying a rare moment without the kids. While driving home I noticed the beautiful light as the golden hour arrived and asked if she would let me take a shot of her in that light. This is the first shot I took, before making adjustments to the camera. Later shots were much better in terms of adjusting for the light. But my wife quickly grew bored with all of this and lost the great smile that appeared in the first shot. So I'm going with this shot because a great smile beats perfect camera settings.
And yes, for the record, I have these photos for the blog out of order a bit while I'm catching up. This was actually taken before the dragonfly photo.
More catching up on the photo blog. Nothing much to comment on here. I found this guy in a swamp by the edge of the road. It turned out surprisingly well considering that he was probably twenty feet away.
Sadly, a few days ago my computer was taken out by a nasty virus that I was simply unable to remove. Eventually I gave up and resorted to the nuclear option. I wiped the hard drive clean and installed a fresh new operating system. This became my excuse for finally upgrading from Windows XP. Vista looked like a turkey right from the get go, so I waited it out and eventually Windows 7 arrived. And that's where I am now. It's certainly better looking than XP and has managed not to crash on me so far, so that's nice. I am majorly annoyed at having to reinstall all my software and drivers from scratch.
Anyway, photography did not stop while I was offline for a few days. So now we're going to get caught up.
The first shot is my cat Maggie. I like this photo because it almost makes her look fearsome. If you know my cat, this is hilarious. She is both tiny and the world's worst mouser. Plus, she's almost dog-like in her affections and general neediness.
Up next is this gorgeous sunset over the old DQ. There's not much to say about that. Sunsets are reliable sources of beauty for photographers. I almost feel lazy taking a shot like this and posting it. But it is a great sunset, so deal with it.
I'll be back later today with some more photos to get caught up with. Now I need to work out just how far behind I am...
At dinner my son started showing me his zombie face and vampire face. He's much better at the zombie face. So I thought I'd see just how much extra effort would be needed to get the kid ready for appearing in a movie. Not that much it turns out.
And for the record, it was taco night. No brains.
You didn't see them, because they were pretty dull, but I spent a bit of time yesterday trying to take a picture of a slug. What was interesting is that I stumbled upon something in my camera I didn't realize I had. Or I sort of knew that it was there but hadn't given any thought to the implications. The Canon T2i has a way to zoom in on the live view on the camera's LCD. Now this was mentioned as a feature for video. On my previous video camera, I ignored the digital zoom because it's essentially useless. So on this camera I figured this was the same thing and ignored it.
But then I accidentally turned the zoom on while taking stills. And then a real use for the feature hit me. It makes focusing on tiny objects much easier. With the slug, this wasn't all that exciting. It was only marginally more interesting zoomed in than it was at regular size. But some things are genuinely much more interesting in the extreme close up. This beetle for instance. This shot was take with the kit lens that came with the camera. But I was still able to get a tight focused close up. Pretty cool.
Now I'm excited to break out the macro lens again to see what I can do with this.
Even though I take a lot of photos of plants and flowers, I'm bloody awful at growing them. Cacti have died under my watch. That's the kind of awful we're talking about here. But despite that, my love of a home grown tomato causes me to try and grow the blasted things just about every year. The results have been firmly in keeping with my skill level. What that means is that usually around September we can pick a couple of misshapen dwarfish tomatoes too small to make more than a token number of BLTs.
Last year wasn't my fault. No, really. They were literally drowned by a flood. The year before was my fault. I planted them much too late and never fertilized. And then there was the year I tried those funky upside down pots. Let's not talk about it. The two years before that they kept getting some sort of rot that turned the bottoms black. Experience tells me to take the blame for that too but I really don't know the reason.
That brings us to this year. I planted them on time. They've been fertilized. There hasn't been a flood or a serious heat wave. They're getting watered regularly. And in this photo you seem the first signs of the coming goodies.
I'm going to be annoying and not say what this is. It's purely because I want people to guess. Did you ever read Games magazine? I don't even know if they still publish it. But it used to have this contest where you had to try and guess what things were based on extreme close up photos. This isn't exactly an extreme close up but there's nothing in the photo but the one object, so it's similar.
In the latest installment of "John Knows Squat About Plants," we have this fellow. This patch has hundreds of the things, next to a tennis court. I have not even the slightest idea what it is. But it is common as dirt around here. If your lawn hasn't been mowed regularly, you have this critter in great abundance on your property.
Mostly I like this photo for the way this plant pops compared to the heavily out of focus background. It almost feels like a 3D movie, only without the irritating glasses, high ticket price and incessant braying by fanboys about how awesome it is.
We had a little thunderstorm this afternoon. Naturally it occurred while I was trying to grill some ribs for dinner. But I took the delay in stride, grabbed the camera and tried to see what sort of interesting water action I could capture from cars going by. In case you haven't noticed, I'm fascinated by what fast things look like when frozen by the camera.
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