echodrift

Fur babies

I haven’t posted anything about my fur babies lately, have I. Except they aren’t really babies anymore. Poe especially is getting quite big. They decided to have some fun as I was making up the bed yesterday so I took some time out to play with them. I ended up with one good one of Midna, which is one more than I usually get, and several good ones of Poe.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I do not like WordPress’s image upload features. I’d rather do it manually, but then I miss out on the auto thumbnails and whatnot.

Getting there

Well now. Over the weekend I had a bit of server issues. Basically, I woke up Saturday morning to find that it was down. Later that day my host responded to my ticket and offered to move me to a new server they were bringing online. I gladly accepted. Since it looks like my DNS has propagated again my sites are good to go. So far the new server has been behaving very well.

I had planned to do some maintenance to the site over the weekend, WordPress upgrades and whatnot. Since everything was in transition I was unable to do so. The time off actually gave me some more time to think. I’ve been putting a bit of time into my 365 project. It’s making the idea of a photoblog a bit… superfluous. It’s also causing my flickr account to fill up, which is another problem. I haven’t decided what to do yet but I might end up nixing the photo blog. I’m terrible at coming to decisions, though, so who knows.

One of the things I did do instead of updating sites (that couldn’t be updated) was create a mosaic for my pictures from February. I am pleased to say that I got 27 of the 28 days of February. I think it’ll be something to look back on all of these at the end of the year.

By the way, it is confusing to come back to adding WordPress tags after dealing with flickr for a few weeks. There, you separate tags with a space and use quotes if you want a two-or-more word tag. WordPress, of course, makes you separate them with commas.

My Nikon D60

While visiting my parents this weekend my sisters and I decided to see if we could find any deals at Circuit City. I didn’t walk in intending to buy anything. I didn’t even know that what cameras Circuit City carried. When I saw their camera aisle I found out that they had Nikon D40s, D60s, D80s, and the D90, all marked down 20%. I guess you can see what I walked out with.

Even then, it wasn’t an easy decision. I had thought that maybe I would buy a D90 instead. I think I fell prey to the idea of “must have the latest, greatest, bestest camera” mentality. This, however, was my first chance to actually hold one in my hands. I found out that the hand grip is actually a little large for my hands. After just a few minutes holding it I knew it would be a very larger camera for me to handle. Add that to the fact that it cost twice as much as the D60 beside it; I decided I wouldn’t be buying the D90. Later I found out that the only one they had left was the display model. That would have decided it for me if I hadn’t already made the decision. Turns out that while I was there someone bought the display D90, a display flash, one of their over priced SD cards and who knows what else. (Really, even with memory cards at 20% off they were ridiculously priced.)

Continue reading…

Focusing

Earlier this week meteorologists were calling for a huge ice storm to sweep the area. Tuesday morning I woke up to find a few teeny tiny icicles on the trees but that was about it. The worst of the storm passed north of us. While I am grateful that we were spared the sweeping power outages I was a little upset that I didn’t get a chance to photograph any.

When I came home from work later that day I noticed that the trees had quite a bit of raindrops still holding on. Of course, the trees with the most accessible raindrops were in my neighbor’s yard. I hope they don’t mind my taking the liberty of stepping a few feet into their yard to snap a few shots.

Sadly, my first few shots turned out to be disappointing. My current camera has no manual focus option so I had to rely on its auto focus. For some reason it couldn’t tell that I was trying to focus on the tiny branch with the even tinier water drop. Then I remembered a trick my husband had told me that his sisters told him about.

Simple focusing trick

1. The problem. You want to take a close up shot of something tiny. Maybe it’s a flower or a little twig, like this example. Try as you might you just can’t get your camera to focus on the object you are trying to photograph.
2. The solution. This would probably work with anything that is somewhat larger than your subject but since you will always have your hands with you, I’ll say hand. Place a hand directly beside or immediately behind your subject. Allow your camera to focus while your hand is in the frame. It might take a bit to play with the placement to get it right but you should be able to bring your subject into focus. (Obviously you would want to take your hand out of the picture before you take it.)
3. The result. Once the camera is focused as desired, remove your hand and snap away.

Because of that trick, I was able to get the shot below and several others that can be found at my flickr account. I hope to write more how-to and tip articles such as this in the future so keep an eye out!

Photography

A short while ago I wrote a post and asked for suggestions on topics I could write about. Tessa suggested that I write about photography. She also suggested that I talk about photography on ANTM. Her suggestion opened up quite a bit for me to write about, though ANTM deserves its own post.

Today I’ve decided to talk about taking pictures for the fun of it. To me, photography doesn’t have to be all about the technical aspects like “Is the lighting exactly right?” or “Am I applying the rule of thirds?” or anything else. There are many times when I take pictures just so that I and others can later look back on them and remember what a fun time it was and not worry about how great or poor the pictures actually are.

Take last weekend. My friend decided that she was going to bake cookies and decorate them. By “baking cookies” I thought she meant 2 or 3 dozen. I was way off. I don’t know how many she did end up cooking but there were a lot.

That shows just a portion of the ones we decorated. We ended up not decorating them all because A) there were too many and B) the holes in our makeshift icing bags (made from ziploc bags) became too large and started spilling icing everywhere. Some of our decorating escapades gave birth to the story that unfolds below.

From a technical aspect there are probably multiple things wrong with the pictures. The angles could have been better, the cookies could have been positioned better, or something else. But for these pictures, that’s not what matters. What matters is that they exist and that they can remind us of what a fun time we had.

This is just one of the many aspects of photography that I enjoy. Later on I’ll be writing about some of the others… once I get ideas for them, anyway. By the way, I’m still on the lookout for more suggestions for topics to write about.