Category: bliefs

I discovered a new photographer in our house, and it might not be who you’d expect.

Wait wait wait…back up. I tend to dish out a fair amount of grief about stuff. I almost always mean it good-naturedly, I think I am joking, but it isn’t always taken that way; and it serves me right.
One of the subjects over which I dwell on is photography.
I struggle and take some pains to try and take “good” pictures, “artistic” pictures, interesting pictures, entertaining pictures. I like macro shots of things and I like different angles. I think I have a lot of room for improvement while I insist on “practicing” what I have learned, occasionally ad-nauseum.
Who knew? I’ve been spelling ad-nauseam wrong this whole time

I really detest flash-fill, automatic, indoor shots** and if they have too much of the rest of the room in them or if the subject is “boorishly” centered or whatever. There are a lot of those kinds of pictures around and while they may document the event, which is one of the primary goals of picture taking in this day and age, I tend to want to skew “artistic” and “interesting”, and I REALLY want the “natural” shots that aren’t posed and NO FLASH. I’m just going to let you know that it is exceedingly difficult in a house full of mermaids, raised with a camera in their face, that love to pose for…well they love to just pose, doesn’t really matter why or where; anyway, it’s really hard to get “natural”.

** Tangent: as a result of my own personal war with indoor flash fill photography I get a lot of poorly lit or blurry indoor shots. I actually don’t mind so much. Eventually I may get a good clean shot or if I don’t have time and I absolutely must document the event, in-focus (how quaint) I may cave and click over to the auto-flash. But when I do that I invariably curse a little frustrated grumble grumble because I wasn’t able to pull it off and I caved and you know, just because I can see that <dimple or whatever> doesn’t make it “good”. If I have a willing subject though, I may get to play around long enough, usually about 4-5 pictures, so I can dial things in.

It tends to go something like this.

Okay, this flash fill shot is the first one in this case because either I knew it was dark in there and I just NEEDED those little dimples, or The Mommy left the camera in this setting from the last time she took a picture. (Note to reader: I tend to take most of the pictures – you can do the math on probabilities of who left what setting where.) So I ended up with this overexposed TeenWolf eyes thing going on and glaring shadows from her doodleoos. In this case the doodleoos and the dimples outweigh the rest but still…urgh.

So I make an oath to the insolent creator of indoor flash photography, turn it over to “manual” and get a TON of little blinky lights, some of them red. Probably not gonna take a good shot. But now we have some natural color, a little dark and blurry perhaps but to tell you the truth, I prefer a blurry shot like this over TeenWolf. Besides, blurry is more realistic, especially at dinner, this one never sits still.

So I show her the next three or so failed attempts, coax her back to her spot against the blank wall, and then finally, a good combination, with some minor levels correction in post production for color balance. She held still, for the .3 seconds or whatever and I can feel good about this picture. But, my subject was only interested in this much sitting around based on the reward of seeing her perfectly curved, little pipe-cleaner, doodleoos after each attempt. And, the natural-ness of the shot has degraded quite a bit after all that direction.

I am not going to try and quantify or qualify “good”, “artistic”, or “interesting” at length, there are entire classes in Philosophy of Art for that. (If you are interested, by the way, I know the Professor.)

I will be making a much more brief definition for good, artistic, interesting, and natural in an ostensive fashion; thank you The Mommy.

By way of back-story, The Mermaids REALLY wanted to rake up the leaves to play in them, and have been asking to do so for weeks. The Mommy really just wanted to sit and rest. I’m glad she grabbed the camera.

It took me a while to get to some of these pictures…I had some unusual trouble with my mac that was fixed when, well it stopped doing what it was doing – which was nothing. That is it was doing nothing when it should have been doing something.

I don’t think I did anything different other than crash the program.

To sum up: I didn’t do anything and it suddenly stopped doing nothing, that is, something.

So, here is a halloween set, mixed in with a couple of other events from the past month. Toodleoo for now.

The Wee Mermaid really likes to sit on cows.

She had a really good day with her class at Spooner Farms.

I have a nasty case of spine-age just looking at her doing this. Oh for the days when your bones are like rubber.

Emma also started ‘nastics. She has been putting up with her sister for long enough and is proving to be a little powerhouse.

10 points to the first person to guess what her pumpkin will be carved as.

Did I mention that Emma is really into the whole pumpkin thing?

La Grande art director made sure her teensy tiny pumpkin was “under the sea”. Meanwhile the Daddy got a case of carpal tunnel.

I wasn’t kidding about the pumpkin thing, she is literally “into” pumpkins.

La Grande Sandy (from the movie Grease – oh and this is “bad [that means good]” Sandy)

Sandy’s & Witches & Pumpkins, oh my!

And this is Sta-Puft – from Ghostbusters. I made it from scratch for an office party and the 20-30 hours of work could only be justified if I paraded around my neighborhood in it for an hour. And to answer everyone’s first and most important question – Yes.

I was hot.
Really hot.

This afternoon I had one of those rare bright ideas that just needs to be shared so other parents might be able to put it in their toolkit or build upon it.

While making a pb&j sandwich I thought that if hid a blueberry somewhere in the sandwich I could simultaneously get the mermaids interested in eating lunch and maybe even get them to eat their entire sandwich in search of the singular blueberry treasure.

It worked.

Abby found hers halfway through and wanted another hidden treasure in the other half and Emma cruised through her whole sandwich so fast that she didn’t notice when she got her surprise.

The only rule was no peeking and no poking.
In both cases mission accomplished (lunch was eaten) AND fun was had along the way.

This batty bat was made by La Grande Mermaid this morning but we are not allowed to put it up as a Halloween decoration.
She did give me permission to post it here.

On a bike, the only thing slipperier than this is ice.

See if you can spot the pumpkin in this picture.