January 9, 2010

It was too cold to go outside and take pictures.  Well, probably.  It sure looked like a cold day.  To tell the truth, I didn't attempt it.  My wife made dinner: stuffed shells and little toast things with fontina cheese and roasted red bell peppers.  Topped it off with a big cup of hot chocolate.

January 8, 2010

Quick picture before my battery died.  There are little skeletons, stars, and rubber chickens(!) hanging on my cubicle wall.  Just for fun, I placed a piece of tissue to dull the flash.

January 7, 2010

It snowed.  A lot!  I have a rear-wheel drive car, and it's a delight (!) to drive when there's a lot of snow.  The traction control kicks in every 2 minutes. The freeways were really bad, so I took the city streets home.

Driving up a hill, I was seriously concerned that I was not going to make it to the top.  The taxi in front of me was sliding back and forth in front of me.  I, on the other hand, had my traction control grinding up the hill.

January 6, 2010

  This is a photo of the reflection of my camera (obviously.)  The mirror was plastic, so there was a lot of distortion.  I did a 4 second delay at ISO 50.  It took 7-8 shots, but it came out nicely.

The fun trick was to get the camera to focus on the right spot.  I used a rubber chicken (!) to trip the camera to focus on a reflective point.  After that, it was pretty easy.  The lens attached is a 52mm polarizer, so that should have acted as an ND4 filter.

January 5, 2010

I like this picture; I stood in the parking lot early this morning before I went into the building, and fired off a couple of shots before going in.  Then I played around with Photoshop a bit until a came up with the shot we have here.

After talking to someone at work, I think I'll need to come up with some themes and categories so I don't get redundant.  I do plan on moving to a dSLR camera- not sure which yet.  I have my choices narrowed down to 2 cameras: the Pentax K-x or the Canon Rebel 500d.

Both cameras spec out nicely, and looking at DPReview. it doesn't look like I could go wrong with either of them.

I like the Pentax for the availability of cheap older lenses and in-body anti-shake.  It's also built like a little tank. (but not as solid as the Pentax K-7).  The Canon has a higher resolution, better LCD display, and you can throw a rock and hit a retailer.

As far as I can tell, the Pentax supports wireless flash out of the box, but the Canon supports remote (via laptop / usb).

Lastly, I can pick up the Pentax with thee second 55-300mm f/4-5.6 lens, an 8gig SDHC card, and a 58mm polarizer for less than the Canon with just the 18-55mm.  The Canon is shooting at 15.1 MP against the Pentax's 12.3M.  For what I'll be doing, I doubt I'll need to worry about this difference.  But I still need to consider it.

Guess we'll see when the money is available . . . .

January 4, 2010

Nothing better than a big mug of hot chocolate. 3 parts skim milk, 1 part fat-free half and half. Regular hot chocolate mix, a dose of Hershey's syrup, and some white chocolate melting discs.

Finally, top it off with whipped cream and chocolate covered marshmallows.

January 3, 2010

My little girl has bouts of photo creativity, and I was playing with my camera at the same time.

I've been experimenting with softening the flash by placing a tissue in front of it. It softens the light a bit (but I think I was a bit overzealous with the tissue).

January 2, 2010

I took this outside my front door. We have a holly bush out there, and as you can tell, I'm still trying to get my shot in for the day. I tweaked it a little bit in Photoshop.

It was a really cold day, and I reached out of the house and fired off a few shot to see what would pan out.

January 1, 2010

January 1st, 2010

Well, alright, not technically, since I almost forgot my resolution on the first day! It's not my best picture by any means - look at the barreling!

I'm going to cut myself some slack, though. It was 2 a .m. on Jan 02, and I was really tired and rushing for a photo.

Note the big shadow on the floor. That's from the wide angle extender on my Minolta Z1. It's a little to close for the flash to be happy about. At least the living room's clean, though!