Category: pictures

Short on story, long on photos

I’m far behind on sharing these days and in order to catch up I figure I can get the equivalent of thousands of words with the following pictures.

Some explication may ensue.

Let’s begin with Halloween shall we?
Some of you have seen these pictures but in the interest of market saturation; observe.

TheWeeOne went for a sweet look.
Mermaid Shortcake

While LaGrande went for something a little…darker.
Mermaid Twilight
If you know the Twilight Series, you may see the resemblance she was shooting for – namely Dakota Fanning’s character Jane. If you don’t know that series – I supply you with a Picture-in-Picture comparison right here.

Ahhh, back to my sweet daughter.
Mermaid Dreaming

Yikes!
Mermaid Vamping

Moving on to LaGrande’s birthday party a few days later – this is the cake that TheFrostingAngel made.
Butterfly Birthday Cake

Pardon me while I apologize to my future self for all of the faddish images with the blurry borders – they’re presets and right now they look pretty cool.

Sorry future self, I hope these pictures still look fine in five years.

Annnnnd, back to our show…on that birthday night 10 girls stayed the night and north of 15 friends attended the evening festivities. Suffice it to say, that’s a whole lot of pre-teen. ’nuff said.
Partayyyyy

Now I’m more or less caught up to yesterday in The Mermaid Chronicles whereby TheMermaids and I took our annual jaunt to Seattle to see Santa and this time we coupled the trip with a play at The 5th Avenue Theater…
Family of Mermaids

…to see another princess.
Mermaid Shortcake

TheMermaids look like they come by all this culture quite naturally.
Mermaid Shortcake

And finally, another traditional ride on the Carousel.
Carousel - yet another cultural reference

The picture with Santa will have to wait for another day.

Thanks

It doesn’t seem sufficient to only give formal thanks for the possibilities and opportunities at my (our) feet one day a year.

But right now, punch-drunk on tryptophan and simple carbohydrates I am lucky to muster a nap.

Thanksgiving.

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Lead

A large chunk of my afternoon was consumed by a very very small piece of lead.
I found this one in the kitchen sink hose (pull out handle).

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Two new ball valves (upgrades), a new hose found in a drawer at McLendons (thanks plumbing guy), a cut thumb (which means I’m done), and a huge mess in the kitchen later; sigh.
No bike maintenance tonight.

New Camera

We all know that we’ve had Halloween since the last time I’ve made a post.
In point of fact, there’s also been a birthday and an anniversary in this same time-frame and it appears I’m only a month in arrears.

So, there are pictures of those events, but that’s not what finally got me off my duff – it is (was?) my new camera.

Ya seeeee, in the weeks before Halloween I was busily engaged in making PacMan ghosts for my office costume party. TheWeeOne wanted to film, direct, bestGrip, and narrate “A Five Year Old’s Version of How It’s Made”.

What is quite clear to me know is that while Wee excels at filming, directing, and narrating (for a five year old) the machinations of a costume build her grip is rather typical for a five year old.

So, I upgraded!

After some research, I came to realize that our iPhones are suitable as point-and-shoot, have with us anywhere cameras, and that paying a premium for a good quality, “take anywhere” compact camera wasn’t an operating goal of mine any longer. So, I moved up the chain (and in the process COMPLETELY ignored some rather good advice about DSLR’s from my friendly neighborhood photo-geek) and traded a Canon SX40HS for some CreditCard points we’ve accumulated.

My targets were:

    • long optical zoom lens – check.
    • decent low-light imagery (low noise) – check
    • very fast frame-per-second option – check
      (These 1st three were must haves based on my expected usage shooting poorly lit dancers at a distance who tend to jump around a lot)
    • small enough to carry in a purse or small bag – check

(This and $$ were the biggest reasons for ignoring aforementioned photo-geek)

  • powerful enough to enable good manual features – check
  • macro options – check
  • RAW support – zzzzzt!
    (but with CHDK, I may not have to wait long…but that’s another post)
  • Canon if possible – check
    (I’m not married to Canon but since TheMommy and I generally know the interface, well, there is value in familiarity)
  • Good video capabilities – check

So, here are some sample shots to get things started.

With a long lens, it turns out, image stabilization is rather necessary to counteract shake. This camera has an excellent pre-set feature for taking low-light photos, without a tripod.

Check out this shot of the moon on a clear night.

Do you see the mountain goat?

Pretty awesome – and at 100% crop, with no retouching, you can see some blurring and jaggy jpg’s

M-O-O-N that spells Moon.

The way it does this low-light anti-blur thing is it takes four shots in rapid succession, each one likely too low to see much individually – but then the camera lines them up a little bit (stabilize) and stacks them together, on the fly, to make one good (perhaps) image.

You can see what happens then if a moving subject enters the scene.

Ghost cars and bike lanes

But seriously, the bike lane marker and other things in the background?! Not blurry.
This won’t really help with moving dancers methinks, unless I can call it artistic, but it sure is fun to play with on still subjects.

The feature on this camera I know I’ll use is it’s super zoom; The range is (35mm equivalent) 24-840mm which I’m told is the equivalent of three separate SLR/DSLR lenses. Granted the quality won’t exceed those three lenses but, I am much less likely to A) bring three lenses to a performance and B) have the right one on at the right time. I still may not get zoomed in/out all the way in time but…I’ll take that tradeoff.

Check out the image stabilized, wide angle, low-light mode, shot of downtown Seattle from Alki.

Seattle from Alki

But you know, without any retouching, a 100% crop of this picture shows, whatever you call that – lots of bleeding lights – and quite a bit of noise. Not pretty at 100%.

Seattle from Alki 100 percent crop

So, let’s zoom in all the way, don’t change a thing on the settings and see what a 100% crop of The Space Needle will look like.

Space Needle from Alki 100 percent crop

Now, that’s pretty cool. Put that sucker on a tripod in manual mode and you might resolve people in them-thar windows.

And, since you’ve made it this far, I’ll demonstrate the results to be had using the ultra-fast, 10 frames per second mode. What better than two TheMermaids jumping…

…off the bed…

One little monkey jumping on the bed

…and off the ground.

One BIG monkey jumping

Both of these were middle shots of 6-8 pictures – the other shots weren’t quite as impressive although interesting to look at in succession.
This mode, unrestrained, does tend to fill up memory rather rapidly. More to come.

Impressive

Last night, just before bed, TheWeeOne did something I was never able to do.
Let me ‘splain.

See, she has this loose tooth that she really wanted out of her mouth and she had this romantic idea that she could tie some dental floss to her tooth, the other end to a doorknob, and then shut that door WHAM!

It didn’t go exactly like that.

First we I tied a slip knot to the tooth and I predicted,

We’re only going to get one chance at this.

Boy was I going to be wrong.

After we were all prepped LaGrande was fretting in the living room and called out,

WeeOne! After you’re done, and when you cry, I want to come and run and give you a hug and I don’t care if you get blood on my shirt okay?!!

TheMommy held her tight and I pushed the door…

WHAM!

From the other room,

What happened??!

The slip knot slipped off.

So TheMommy refitted the slip knot lower and held her tight, LaGrande was now fretting in the bathroom next to us, I pushed the door and…

WHAM!

The floss stretched to it’s maximum tension and stayed put on both ends with only the slightest wimper from TheWeeOne. So we released the tension and stepped back a step. I was incredulous at the bravery here, I NEVER would have done this as a kid.

TheMommy held, LaGrande fretted, the third countdown and…

WHAM! klink klink

That was it. The tooth was out, clearly, it landed on the counter next to a pile of who-tails.
Narry a cry, narry a whimper, the only thing we got out of her, with her tongue firmly planted on the roof of her mouth, was

Ah donh’ lahk ‘a tayst a’

Toofless

 

 

Bicycle Interlude

Yesterday I rode with TT, a fellow recumbent bike rider whom I met in Portland, north from his place up to Big Lake along the Centennial Trail and beyond. Total mileage was about 76 miles.

The destination was a 5.5 mile time trial up a hill held every year by the Skagit Valley Bicycle Club.
Thanks to Marshall the marshall who timed us and sagged.

TT handled this time trial (also known as a TT) quite well showing me and the other rider just how it’s done. I finished third 🙂 a full six minutes and change behind TT.

This picture is my meager iPhone-attempt at capturing the amazing view from the top of little mountain park.

A Bent With a View

I’m pretty tired today after all that riding. My 60 min, commute-based, conditioning doesn’t do much to prepare for an 80 miler with a Hillclimb sprint.

Thanks to TT for pulling me all the way back.

Hornworm caterpillar

One of The Mermaids noticed this caterpillar, after our latest kayak expedition, under the willow tree by the boat launch.

It was just chilling there on one of the paddles.

I’ve looked it up on whatsthatbug.com but can’t find an identified picture which matches the patterns and markings.

Could be a Tomato Hornworm or a Sphinx Hornworm.

I did see an exact match on a flickr site (google image search for [caterpillar “blue horn”]) but that guy thinks it’s a hummingbird moth caterpillar.
I think that’s wrong based on what I’ve seen.

Any takers want to identify this beauty?

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Staycation 2011 – Part II : Science

The second part of my recent stay-cation, and every bit as good as Empire, ended up being focused on things that might be generally categorized as “science”.

We began at The Burke Museum and saw lots of fossils, bones, stories, and pictures.
Now THAT'S a femur.

The Burke (hipsters like me shorten the name affectionately – not to be confused with the trail of the same affectionate, hipster-like name) is an amazing resource really, it is nicely sized for a short day-trip and amounts to a bit more than your typical childs attention span. And if you feed them appropriately, the children that is, it may stretch even longer.

It’s no Smithsonian but it’s also not a drive-thru tree with an attached gift-shop.

Still amazing to me is the beak on this prehistoric, and aptly named, Terror Bird.
Not your average Toucan
It was supposedly only about 9-10 feet tall – imposing sucker I tell you and I would have sworn it was 15 feet tall if it was an inch. I am rather glad we don’t have to contend with this beast in the modern day; lions and bees and bears and lunatics are quite enough for this slightly paunchy father of two thankyouverymuch.

At the Woodland Park Zoo we got to see “REAL” dinosaurs; this one even spit at us.
These guys woulda given the Velociraptors a run for their money in JP
The T-Rex actually caused LaGrande to recoil and cry – and I can see why; it was HUGE and imposing.

TheWeeOne on the other hand
[amazed tangent]
Ya know I just realized that TheWeeOne – if I were forced to resort to giving her an acronym – would be TWO…hehe, not bad.
I may have a natural fallback for when she isn’t so “wee” anymore.
[/amazed tangent]
…as I was saying…TheWeeOne on the other hand wasn’t as fearful and in fact several minutes later made sure that I capture a picture of her running away from the lion…that was chasing her.

Dah da Don da Daaa Da

I mean…THE LION that was chasing her.

Ro Raw Roh ra Rawwwr Ra

There.

Yet another day, we also saved a nice butterfly from death-by-vehicle as it fluttered haplessly about the roadway.

Saved by the Gamper

This butterfly spent two days coddled on fresh flowers in the playhouse and then finally flew away of it’s own volition. That made The Rescue Mermaids VERY happy.

All the while TheMermaids completed their swimming lessons, we swam, and played, and hatched some plans for our last adventure of my staycation, our swansong…which I will detail in the final installment, Part III, of my 2011 Staycation.

Staycation 2011 – Part I: The Camping Trip.

Usually I like to write little memorable bits about things that happen as I go – that way I don’t forget them.
This time, I have to condense all two weeks of my staycation into one post…maybe. Perhaps this will be my first multi-part post: stay tuned.

We started with our annual Dash Point camping trip.

Hammock Mermaid Number One
TheWeeOne actually decided to sleep in the hammock the first night – and except for that whole ‘getting cold’ thing at 2AM – it worked out swimmingly.

Hammock Mermaid Number Two
Of course – as you can see – the hammock provided hours of entertainment and screeching. I tried to endure it – but ultimately it was just too concerning: the possibility of a sprained neck and the possibility of a burst eardrum.

Forest Mermaids
We hiked both days. This year, the amphibians were mere tadpoles and the water levels were REALLY high. The huckleberries were in season though – and we even picked enough to make a good pie in the end.


Of course – there was a traditional fire – but this time we had HUGE marshmallows. Amazingly, their girth allows for better cooking. I am not clear on what makes them better but I got some amazing browning – that then allowed for removal of the outer layer and then another browning would do the inner layer again. I even managed a triple after I really perfected my technique – and pumped up TheMermaids blood sugar levels (see Hammock Screeching).

Ultimately, the beach was what we (read as they) were after. We went both days of the weekend and despite extremely high tides and cooler weather, we managed a nice sandcastle and even buried the girls to their necks in sand.
Right before they 'popped their tails'.

And of course – we finished it off with our traditional bench family photo.
Family Bench Photo

As you can see by the title, I have decided that this will be Part I of perhaps three parts.
It is really amazing how even though I was home for all of the two weeks, I didn’t have any significant time to actually blog any of this.

That’s good actually. 🙂