I don't use facebook, but

here is an interesting article on Facebook & Your Photographs for those of you who do.

ISO <3

It's amazing what having a proper ISO will do for you.

I wish I'd dropped the shutter speed on this and allowed a tiny bit more DOF, but I still love it.

Light!

In the office/library/craft room there is this ugly, ugly, ugly textured yellow glass window alongside the fireplace. It is long and narrow, and lets in highly directional light that does little to actually illuminate anything but a handful of bricks.

In the interests of snatching it before it went away, I snagged the children out of the backyard for light experimentation. I ignored the ragamuffin tangles and the lunch smeared all over their faces. My lens is not fast enough for quite this low light, so I had to crank up my ISO (ironic, neh?) to get anything workable. I knew that I'd be clipping into the blacks, but I was hoping to get something fairly tenebristic and so went that way rather than clipping into the whites. I think that in the future I can drop my ISO a bit and sacrifice the shutter speed in order to do so. They weren't moving overly much. If I can cram an adult into this little corner, I might have even more success with it.



Things start innocently enough.

It's easy to be patient with your mother when you're busy hamming it up.

The patience is wearing thin.

After ten minutes, the process has melted down entirely.
Imala looks like a bored thug, and Lore has set himself to a fine display of dramatics.
I let them go, made note of my settings, and left it at that.

I am sick again. I have midterms this week. YARG. I blame this:



Damn kids. Get off my lawn.

Taken on the front porch. Yes that's me in his eyes. I've decided to leave myself there.
Evening light. 50mm . f8@1/400
1600 ISO (hence the noisy bits)

On a more positive note, I've learned that much of my frustration with my photographs is due to some default setting in my camera. I keep setting my ISO to 400, and it keeps switching it around. It took me a while to notice, but I was suffering from a great deal of frustration with the noise in my images (such as the one above). Apparently, in addition to setting the ISO, I have to turn off the auto ISO feature. Now whose bright idea was that??

Hopefully I'll feel well enough to shoot something I like and get it printed in time for my QoL assignment. I have not been terribly happy with any of the ones I've taken specifically for this assignment.

Today I am 28.

I'm working nearly full time, going to school part time, volunteering, and raising two children (the last part with help, phew).

I just wrote the check for our first ever mortgage payment.

Sometimes life feels very .. well, overwhelming.

At the same time, it almost feels like I'm cheating. It really shouldn't be this easy, right? I mean, who changes careers at 28, especially with so much financial responsibility? Especially into such an income-risky profession? Especially to something they Love? Who has the right to be that lucky?

It's my second birthday without my mom. I wish I could call her up and talk about it all. Hey mom; look. I'm a photographer!



Okay, yeah. You can still be proud of me without me sticking my tongue out. :P

Yesterday was a bad day. From the moment I woke up (the husband turned off my alarm so I woke up late), to the nightmares as I was trying to get to sleep. I even got my first ever moving violation. Happy early birthday; I guess?

Today is a good day. I'm at the in-laws with the wee one. He's all about the woods and the dogs. I'm all about the light.




The sun was setting on the drive out. It was all I could do not to pull over every three seconds to take pictures. Unfortunately it's not something you get to do when you have an impatient three year old in the back seat.

Yarg. I fail at communication with authority figures.

Note to self: Do not try to segue. It is not good.

This class is FRUSTRATING me. It frustrated me enough that I even felt the need to encourage the professor to be a hardass. That was extremely difficult to do, and I botched it up royally, but that is how distressing this is. If you don't want to participate, why are you here?!

No; I don't expect everyone to be as excited as I am. Not everyone has denied themselves something they love for over ten years, and then gets to just turn around midstream and go chasing after it. I know this, but...

ENGAGE. Please. People. At least try. Please? I'm trying for you, but it's really easy to get to feeling defeated. It's not like most of us know what the heck we're doing. There's no need to feel embarrassed or as though you're going to sound stupid. Just speak your mind and volunteer your opinion. It's an opinion, not a statement of fact. Hell, if you know the statement of fact, volunteer that. Something, anything but glazed staring.

Yes, yes, I know most aren't reading this, but it's a vent about class in a class blog. Mrph.

Picture. Pictures are good. I wish I could see more class pictures! Maybe I post too many.





Cropped from the bracketing assignment.