The Water Table, Settings Snafu and Spot Metering! {Oh My!}

My mom bought Elias a water table that arrived last week and let me just say that this is about the greatest summer toy ever! He is so entertained by it for such a long time. He uses it outside, which is a good way to get out and play without getting into stuff he shouldn’t (the hose. the grill.) From our living room, we can easily see into the backyard, so I’ve opened the blinds and let him stay outside while keeping an eye on him. He is turning into such a big boy!

A Basic Snafu…

So, I was taking pictures of Elias and his new water table and somehow through an incorrect sequence of button mashing and wheel clicks (I was trying to fiddle with the flash settings and I never use the on-camera flash…) I somehow set my camera to shoot as JPEG Basic instead of Raw. Gasp! When I grabbed my camera the next night to take some more shots I thought it said it had 30 exposures left. But after shooting some incredibly beautiful sunset skies I looked down and it still indicated 30 exposures. Until I looked closer and it actually read 3.0k exposures. Oh no! I set it back to Raw, but it taught me a valuable lesson on looking at my camera’s display to confirm settings every time I pick it up.

I’m entering this photo in this week’s Skinned Knees Photo Challenge! The theme is, Splash! Click the link or icon and head on over to Skinned Knees to see this week’s awesome entries!

The next series of photos are submitted for Skywatch Friday! Please be sure to check out the site to view everyone’s really cool sky shots!

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Low Angle Play Room

This week’s DPS Forum Assignment is “Low Angle“. This is a great one for me since I’m almost always on the ground taking photos. With a 50mm, you kind of have to get right in front of your subject.

I took these photos in the play room the other day with the theme in mind. No, I don’t think they’re my best work at all and not even very original. The important thing is that I’m actually working toward assignments again. I’ve been concentrating so much on photo editing (and obviously still am based on the appearance of these photos) that I haven’t put much into photography and that’s gotta stop if I want to end up with any photos I can be proud of. The assignment doesn’t end until 6/23, so I’m hoping to get some more Low Angle shots in before then.

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History Palette Helps with Workflow

I’ve spent the past few days ignoring the pending articles I have to write and concentrating on a new index layout. I wanted something more in the style of a magazine and though I searched high and low for a WordPress theme that would meet my needs, I did not like any of the options. So I tore the WordPress loop inside and out, dusted off my PHP skills and coded the front page the way I wanted it to be. I still have some minor tweaks and improvements here and there, but it’s a pretty cool piece of work if I do say so myself! Please take a look and let me know what you think!

I’m not even going to pretend like I know all the ins and outs of using the history palette, but over the past week I’ve found using snapshots to be an invaluable improvement to my workflow. In this article, I’ll explain how I used snapshots to work on editing the photo above and how to set up a shortcut to take a snapshot. But first, one needs to know what a snapshot is and how to take one.

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Noah’s Birthday Party

On Sunday we invited several friends and family members over to celebrate Noah’s first birthday! Mark and I are not really the partying type (or maybe it’s just that I’m not the partying type?) and we’ve never truly held a party. The biggest party we’ve ever hosted before was on Mark’s birthday when we had about seven or eight guests in the apartment. For Noah’s party there were roughly 20 guests.

I didn’t start stressing out about it until Thursday or Friday when I realized how much needed to be unpacked and cleaned. Being inexperienced party throwers, I also thought ours would probably be a huge flop. I don’t have anything to compare it to since, as I mentioned, I’m not into the party scene, but I think it went well.

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I’m Not a Big Fan of Baby Powder

Mark had to work all day (7am-6pm actually) and by the time he got home, I was exhausted.

In preparation of Noah’s birthday party on Sunday, I finally got everything from the main part of the house unpacked or put away. There were several boxes left in the play room and behind the couch in the living room. Since we’re not using the ottoman in the living room, I moved it to the play room. I threw a blanket over it because Leah has absolutely destroyed the leather; we really need to figure out how to reupholster it.

Shortly after Mark got home, I went into the bedroom to change my clothes. While I was in there, Elias evidently went into the play room, got the baby powder and poured it all over everything. There was baby powder poured into several toy baskets, the rocking “horse”, in piles all over the place on the floor, pretty much everywhere. The strong scent of baby powder sickened me! My mom and I worked as quickly as possible to clean it up, wipe down or rinse off everything effected and then I vacuumed and vacuumed and vacuumed. I’m not sure that room will ever stop smelling like baby powder.

I snapped this after everything was cleaned up. I was standing probably 10 feet away from this room, in the little hallway between the garage door and front closet. I don’t recommend a 50mm if you want to take pictures of the interior of your house with it!

I wish I would have thought to snap a shot while it was fresh with baby powder snow, but I was too concerned about getting it cleaned up as quickly as possible!

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