It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!

Saturday we went with friends to visit a pumpkin patch and take pictures of the bebes.




Unfortunately, Will was the only one of the babies really in the mood for it. What can I say, he's a really easy going guy. He was all like, "sit here? sure, no problem. Hold a pumpkin? okay. What do you mean I can't eat the grass? Lay down? Okay. Smile? What do you mean? I'm already smiling! Sit in a wagon? I'd love to!"





He's very photogenic, and good thing because mama and daddy love taking pictures. I need to put these on flickr, I haven't uploaded photos there in quite a while, eek!

(Photos 2 and 3 from the husband)

We also bought a smallish pumpkin for me to make a pumpkin dip in for a picnic we're throwing this coming Saturday. I think I may be going a little over-the-top making things. We're getting fried chicken and I'm making Pioneer Woman mac&cheese, Tyler Florence's "Ultimate" baked beans, vegetable soup, pumpkin dip, and chocolate chip pumpkin brownies. The vegetable soup recipe is my own, I might post it later on.

You should come. No really, if you know where we live.

Insta-ghetto-gram

I don't have an iPhone. I don't even have the iPod touch that has a camera (it was $70 more but now I think it might be worth it), yet I wanted to join the Instagram cult. What's a girl to do?

Ghetto rig it.

Here's what I do:

1. Take picture with terrible phone camera. I have a Palm Pre, I like it but the camera leaves much to be desired. Two words: fixed focus. Ugh. An incredibly cute baby counteracts the terribleness of the camera. If you do not have one, one will be provided for you. Wait, no, that's something else entirely.

2. Email photo to myself from the phone.

3. Check email on iPod touch. This is usually done at home, since that's where I have WiFi.

4. Instagram it up!







If you want to follow me on Instagram, my username is OhBuoyancy.

If my baby would sleep at night

I used to make Shawn breakfast every morning. I'm not talking cereal either. Eggs, bacon, sausage, grits, pancakes, omelets; I even tried to replicate a sausage, egg, and cheese mcmuffin once because he basically said he'd rather have McDonalds (rude, right?)
As I got into my 3rd trimester I started going back to bed after he left for work, then I quit getting up at all. Then, well then i had a baby.

There was a window of time when Will was sleeping through the night when I was going to start getting up and making breakfast again (I think I did once) but that window quickly closed. Now the longest stretch of sleep we get is maybe 3 hours at best.

Breakfast isn't the only thing I'm missing. If Will would sleep at night my house would be more organized, I'd bake bread again. Man, I used to bake bread. I would read, oh how I miss reading. I would blog more often; so many times I've started a post and put it off because my brain was too tired to process it. I would write; I have ideas galore for stories or articles I could pitch to web publications, for money. money! but I'm just exhausted. All. The. Time. If you don't get it, you've never experienced sleep deprivation. I mean, my brain does not function the way it should.

Maybe I would even do some of these crafts that I keep buying supplies for.

The pros and cons of DIY family photos

This past weekend we decided to do a little family photo shoot for ourselves.



Doing your own family photos presents some challenges, especially with a baby, but it also has a lot of advantages, like hello, it's free. DIY family photos is not something I recommend for just anyone. You need experience/knowledge, a good quality camera (we used my Canon T1i), a tripod, and some Photoshop skills sure don't hurt. While I wouldn't quite call myself or Shawn a professional photographer, we have both been paid for this hobby that we love and we've been doing it for years. Maybe we're semi-pros. I know my hubby sure is talented with the camera and with Photoshop.

When taking your own family photos you of course have to use a tripod or some other level surface to hold the camera. For families with babies or small children this adds a kink into the normal photo-taking process. Normally when taking photos of a baby there is someone holding the camera and/or someone else near the camera to get the baby to look in the right direction and smile. A tripod placed a few yards away just isn't that interesting to a baby. I thought the beeping from the timer might hold his attention a little bit, but no such luck. So, while attempting to get your baby to look at the camera you may end up with a photo like this:



or this:



On the pro side, it's okay to have photos like this because you have all the time in the world to get the good photo. The only people whose time you're taking up is your own, unlike with a hired photographer who is on a schedule, or may just have some place else to be. Along the same lines, you will never have to forfeit getting a great shot due to weather, lighting, or time. If you don't get that shot today, just go back tomorrow, or next week.

When you're doing your own photos you also have complete control over day, time, and more importantly, location. In fact, you could do as many locations as you want. For example, it was my idea to do some photos in the library like the one at the top of this post and this one:



Not to say that a professional photographer wouldn't let you choose a location, I'm sure most would.

Another thing you won't get when taking your own family photos is professional opinion and instant feedback. We had my camera set on a tripod for most shots (in the last one it was on a stack of books), and used a 10 second timer. Every time a photo was taking one of us had hit the shutter button, hurry to get into position, wait for the shutter, then go back to the camera, review the shot, and set it again if it wasn't good. With a hired photographer you know the shot is being taken at the right moment, when everyone is in their place and looking in the right direction, if the shot wasn't good you'll know without getting up, no running back and forth necessary. Then again, isn't your own opinion of how you look in a photo more important to you than what a photographer thinks?

Oh, probably what some people dislike the most about professional photography is the turnaround time. I've heard of people waiting months for their wedding photos. When you take your own family photos the turnaround time is whatever you make it. We took these photos on a Saturday and, I believe Shawn had them done the following Monday. I think I even had the top photo on facebook Saturday night.

That's pretty much it. If you've done this before, did you have the same challenges? If you haven't and you decide you're not up to the challenge, we're available!

The death of the point and shoot

This is something I've thought about before but it came to my mind again the other day and I decided to post about it.

Who uses point and shoot cameras anymore? Okay, besides your parents, who are always behind on technology anyway.



The fact is that the cameras on our phones have advanced so greatly in the last few years that there is no longer a need to carry another gadget. Shawn's HTC Evo has an 8 megapixel camera and can take HD video. That's better than my Canon PowerShot that I've had for a couple years. The screen is also bigger for viewing the photos.

When I first bought my PowerShot, I took it everywhere with me. It was always in my pocket or my purse. That is until I got a BlackBerry. Once I had that phone I used my camera less and less. Now I have a Palm Pre which sadly has a fixed focus camera, but I still don't carry around a point and shoot. Who does anymore? It's so much more common to walk around a see someone taking a picture with their phone than with a pocket-able camera. It makes so much sense now that phone cameras have come so far. My first camera phone didn't even have a flash but now that's pretty much standard as well as a focus light and a light that will illuminate videos recorded in low lighting.

National Geographic even published a book (The Camera Phone Book: How to Shoot Like a Pro, Print, Store, Display, Send Images, Make a Short Film) about taking photos with your phone a few years back. National Geographic! It's probably already useless to today's phones.

The last thing I used my point and shoot for was to take pictures of furniture and their price tags in a store. Since Shawn got his Evo, we've used it for that purpose. We did use the point and shoot a little bit on our honeymoon. We had both agreed to leave our phones off for the week and thought it best not to take his D40 snowboarding.

So, I see the point and shoot slowly fading away, being replaced by phones, until one day mentioning a point a shoot will be like mentioning an 8-track to today's 9th grader. I definitely don't see p&s technology getting the love that film photography or vinyl records have. The everyday snapshot takers will use their phones while those more serious about photography will have SLRs, the in-betweens will disappear.

The above photo was taken with my Palm Pre.

Flickr Feed

If you read this site through an RSS reader you've probably noticed that I've merged the feed from my Flickr account with the site feed. Now up to five of my recent photo uploads will show along with my regular posts. What do you think of this? Good, bad, neutral?

I wish it would show recent uploads as one single post instead of five individual posts. A mosaic of thumbnails of recent uploads would be cool. I know I could do that myself and make a new post with it, which in a way would be better because then I would have the added benefit of the post showing on the actual site, but this is automated and therefore easier.

Thoughts?

Christmas Photo Essays

Check out these Christmas photo essays from TIME.

Crazy Christmas Traditions - Photo Essays - TIME.

It Happened on Christmas Day - Photo Essays - TIME.

Multimedia Monday: Shark Week!

You should already be aware that this year's "Shark Week" on Discovery channel started yesterday. In honor of this great event (yes, I love Shark Week!) I'll be posting a few times this week about the shows that air. This multimedia Monday is all about the Shark Week website, it has videos, games, pictures, interactive guides; let's just say this post is very geeky but very awesome nonetheless.

Anyone living in Florida, or even someone that visits it often has to be somewhat interested in sharks. I mean, how could you not be given the stats?
I'm a little disappointed this chart doesn't have 2007. While 2007 was supposedly a low year for shark attacks, Florida had 32, highest in the world, followed by Hawai'i, which had seven. That's a big difference.

While I don't play many online games, Discovery keeps advertising their "critically acclaimed" Shark Runners game so I had to play it to see what all the hype was about. The goal is to track down sharks and collect data on them, but the cool thing is is that it is using real sharks and their real movements, taking advantage of GPS tracking. But then when I got to the part of the site where I realize that the game is going on all the time and it's going to email me alerts giving a certain amount of time for me to log back in a do something, I decided this was something I didn't want to get into. If you want to try it out, let us know what you think in the comments.

I did try some other games, though some of them aren't really games, like voting for the coolest shark? I guess voting is a game for some people...I actually prefer other games on discovery.com that are not part of Shark Week, like Life or Death: Lost at Sea. Basically you're given sets of three items to choose from and you have to choose the right items that will keep you alive, it's tricky.

While Discovery does have great pictures on the site, like this one:

if you want something high enough resolution for a wallpaper or if you want a shark screensaver, NationalGeographic is your best bet.

The best parts of the website are the interactive features, like the dive, and the pictures. But really, I think the site could have been better. I especially don't like that they don't have an option to embed their videos (though the videos are great), and the commercials before them are extremely loud compared to the actual video.

As for the shows though, what I've seen so far is awesome. I love MythBusters anyway and the Shark Week Special that aired last night was not to be missed (if you didn't see it, it airs again Wednesday). See a clip of the robotic shark they created here.

I'm also looking forward to Dirty Jobs tomorrow night. Mike thinks they should have monkey week.

For more Shark Week, see the official Discovery.com site.

Multimedia Monday: Stop-motion Food

I love food, you probably do too. I also love stop-motion animation, I wish I had the skills for it. Here are a couple videos that combine these two wonderful things. (If you're viewing this in an RSS reader you may need to click over to view the videos.)


Now those look like crepes to me and not what I would call pancakes, but great video anyway.


Okay, so this one is not real food, but it's still really entertaining and I love the different things they came up with and how they used them. This video is made by PES, you can find more stop-motion videos from them on their website: EatPES.com; "Human Skateboard" is a good one to check out.

Multimedia Monday: PSA-Water

I've actually been meaning to write about the water crisis for several months, but have put it off repeatedly. Today I found this video on Virb°, it's a public service announcement from Charity:Water, that puts everyday Americans in the situation (to an extent, that is) that many in Africa face daily; it pushed me to make this Multimedia Monday's post on water. (If you're viewing this post in a feed reader, click over to see the video.)

Other videos, photos, and media on the Charity:Water website are worth your time as well.


One of the things that I wanted to post when I originally decided to post about the water crisis was this photo essay from TIME, which includes photographs from the book Blue Planet Run: The Race to Provide Safe Drinking Water to the World. Right now you can download the book for free, in pdf form, from that Amazon page. Though, if you can afford to, you can purchase the book from Charity:Water and $70 of the purchase goes to the charity.


While Charity:Water is a great organization, I know more, and feel more strongly about giving to Blood:Water Mission (yes, the charity started by members of Jars of Clay). Blood:Water exists to provide sustainable water sources in Africa by building wells with emphasis on reducing the HIV and AIDS epidemic. Check out the site for information on what they've already done, what they're doing now, and how you can help.

Multimedia Monday: Parkour

Parkour or l'art du déplacement, translated as "the art of displacement" is an activity in which participants or "traceurs" perform daring moves to get from one place to another. They use a combination of gymnastics and martial arts in what often resembles the stunts in chase scenes of action movies. Now that description may make it hard to view parkour as a form of art, which is why you have to see it.


There's something special about viewing these stunts as still images as opposed to live action; I think it adds a certain tranquility and really shows that it is an art. Check out the rest of this photo essay from TIME. You can see that the traceurs take their art seriously planning out the moves and noting precautions they need to take.

Of course there is also some pretty awesome live action videos of parkour online.

parkour from dave keissar on Vimeo.

Though do be aware when searching for these videos that you will find some pretty lame ones as well. Actually, you'll find mostly lame ones on video sharing sites, but do a google and you'll find some good parkour sites like American Parkour.

More info about parkour on Wikipedia.

I used to be into freestyle walking, which is somewhat related to parkour, anyone remember that craze?

That's a negative

Wanted: Secret Agent Photographer

I've probably mentioned before how I don't photograph well, it's like the camera makes me nervous and I end up making a weird face or looking completely frightened. In fact, last fall, in order to get a decent head shot (or mug shot as we call them) for the The Gull's Cry, I had to take the camera with me to the bathroom so I could look at myself in the mirror while I took the picture. While the bathroom method does work sometimes, I get some pretty strange looks coming out of the ladies room with a Nikon D50 in my hand. If I were in New York this would not be a problem, I could just contact MethodIzaz.com and have him (them?) take my picture covert ops style.

From the site:

Using information provided earlier about their weekly routine, the photographer will arrive on the scene, and unseen, take shots of the subject. The subject will be photographed walking through the streets, going about their daily business. Without posing and artifice, the camera captures only the natural beauty of the person.

How awesome is that. Who knows though, even that might not work for me, it's possibly that I make even stranger expression when I'm not being (knowingly) photographed. I'll just have to settle for telling people "I'm really incredibly good-looking, honest!" Or, "Here, watch me look at my own reflection. See, hott (with two ts!), huh?"

Yeah, okay, I'm done now.

It's Official

I am now a college graduate!



Thursday was the last day of classes and I spend Friday cleaning up and getting rid of some papers. I actually keep all of my graded work, because I'm a dork and organize it according to class and semester in my filing cabinet.

Thursday morning was my AMH2020 (US history 2) final. I was actually sort of excited about it because I got to answer an essay question on "The Lost Generation," which includes some of my favorite authors (Hemingway, Fitzgerald). Anyway, I'm sitting in the class room before the test begins, going over my notes, when the girl who sits in front of my comes in. Now I don't think she's said a word to me the whole semester, but today she wants to talk, actually, she wants me to talk. First she says, "what's 'buying on margin'?" So I tell her. Then, "what's the Schiefflin Plan?" and I say, "I don't know," even though I did because I could see where this was going. Then she says, "What about laissez faire economics?" Now I've had it, is she going to ask me about every single term on the study guide? So I say, "You know, I'm trying study for myself here," and give her an 'what are you, an alien?' look.

The nerve of some people!

Now onto University! (hopefully). Still no word from UF, but I did get accepted to USF and it seems more appealing every minute.



In other news, here's a pic of another new (old) toy I got. I had to replace all of the seals in it as well, but now it and the AE-1 are loaded and ready. There seems to be dust or lint trapped under the focus screen though, and I can see it through the viewfinder, really annoying.

As You Can See

the AE-1 has some light leakage. Since the local shop wants $125 to replace the foams, I found a kit and some instructions on ebay and will be re-sealing it myself.

A few of the shots turned out fairly okay though. I was also using expired film, which may account for a little of the color weirdness.

Finals next week!

I Focus Manually!

For a while I've been wanting an older manual focus SLR, a Minolta more specifically. So a couple Saturdays ago my mom and I went downtown to an antique store, I wanted to look for a camera and she had just never been to an antique store before (weird I know).

They actually did have a Minolta SLR, but it wasn't the model I wanted the most and they were asking way too much for it. They also had a Canon SLR, an AE-1, but they wanted $174 for it! Later my mom says, "You know your dad has an old camera like that, a Canon, I think it's in my bedroom." Um, okay.



She gets it out and yeah, it's an AE-1. I actually remember playing with it when I was little, come to think of it. I've been interested in photography for as long as I can remember, I even read books on photography in elementary school (I still am quite strange, thank you).

The best thing though it that the camera still had an old roll of film in it, which I'm going to pick up now.

Ultimate Guide To Becoming a Better Photographer

Sure, you can read many how-to books, online tutorials, and even pay for photography classes, but right here, right now, I'm going to give to you the all-inclusive, ultimate guide to becoming a better photographer. To top that off, it can be done in just 1, yes ONE, easy step. The how-tos, tutorials, and classes can help, but without implementing this crucial 1 step process they are useless.

Step 1: Take more pictures!

The End