Piano Playing and Photography

I enjoyed myself immensely this morning, playing piano in the worship band at church.  It seemed that numbers were down a little which should have been a relief for my first day.  However, nerves do a weird thing to you, and I found sweat coursing down my back while I hit some pretty ghastly wrong notes which hardly anyone noticed and I tried to ignore myself.

And now for something completely different.

My About Me page is now up.  Please visit it to read the story of Lesley and the Fly, and also the details of my first kiss.

And now for something else completely different to that.

Tonight I looked up from my kitchen sink and saw the moon rising from behind some leaves of the trees outside.  It was beautiful.  I decided to take a photo so I headed off to put the following ingredients together: camera, long lens, tripod, and the moon.

I patiently explained to the clamouring children ("Can I have some milk please?"  "Can you stick this onto this bit of paper please?") that I was just going to take a photo, and I took my tripod and camera outside.  While I was fiddling with the settings and wondering how to take this photo on full manual mode, the clouds completely obscured the moon.  I went back inside.  I could have left the camera on the kitchen bench and tried again when the clouds cleared, but I didn't because of the old adage "Expensive Photographic Equipment and Butter Don't Mix."

My photographic career is not an auspicious one.

Weird things I have seen

Here are some photos I've taken recently.

1.  "This notice is printed on a sheet of A4 paper."  This statement in the middle of a page of information at the checkout of a shop mystified me.  Then I realised it was a policy on checking customers' bags in the store, and the policy specified that bags smaller than A4 size didn't need to be checked.  I suppose in retrospect that it isn't as silly as it appeared at first glance.

2.  "Jane learns about Colds & other Viral Infections."  Understandable reading material at the local immunisation clinic, but not my idea of snuggling up with a good book.

3. If a twin pack of lettuce costs X, then to get the unit price (the price if a single lettuce) you'd ... double it?  I include this because it's errors like these that used to bring me down in complex maths, chemistry and physics problems once I'd done all the hard work correctly.

4.  I know none of the Thai language.  Perhaps if I did, I'd understand this better instead of trying to picture what this variety of coconut in this coconut milk must look like.

A Bunch of Bokeh

I'm trying to learn how to take nice photos. Specifically, photos in which the subject is in sharp focus, but the background (and sometimes the foreground) is blurry. I'm talking ultra-blurry, and apparently this blur is called "bokeh".

I've got a digital SLR camera to play with, and I've got advice from such photography gurus as MckMama and The Pioneer Woman, both of whom make it look easier than it is. Maybe that's because I'm trying to go full-manual too early.

I'm at a disadvantage as my aperture can only go as low as 4.0, and sometimes it will only do 4.5 or 5.4 for me. I want to see numbers like 1.8, but I find with a distant enough background, I can blur it well enough.

My garden is my most willing subject, so I went out there today and snapped a lot of plants with backgrounds I could blur. All these pictures are SOOC (straight out of camera - no editing.)

I'm doing okay, but I'm looking for gloops of light and dark, not just a blurry but identifiable background. Keep trying.

And next, I'll work on exposure. Not too dark, not too light. Or not. Maybe I'll clean the kitchen sink or do a load of washing, or get the gravel out of everywhere-it-gets-put.

Spiders Translated

Sorry - I thought I should have translated it, but didn't in the end. Spiders are fizzy drinks with ice-cream. Maybe you call them "ice-cream sodas" or as Tracy suggested, perhaps some sort of "float"? Sarsaparilla is our favourite, and that's what they're having here.

The colour effect is really simple - it's the "Focal B&W" effect in Picasa. Sometimes for a richer effect I put a little saturation in the colours first, then with Focal B&W I can pick the coloured focal point, and Picasa fades the surrounding bits to B&W.

I also love this effect - I tint the whole picture in Sepia first, then use the focal B&W so that the focal point is sepia, with B&W around the edges:



I also am using Picasa to do my photo collages these days - much quicker than uploading them into the Mosaic Maker in Flikr.

Thanks for all your kind comments. I'd love to sit around having sarsaparilla spiders with you all!

A Photo Letter from Sonny Ma-Jiminy to Great Nana

Here is a photo-letter that Sonny Ma-Jiminy recently sent his Great-Nana. You'll notice some real names here - I am planning to tell you Thingamababy's name when he or she is born, and I thought that might be a good name to start using real names on my blog. But an early preview of Sonny's and Smoochy's names is okay, wouldn't you think?

IYGAKAC

"If you give a kid a camera" is a game devised by "DysFUNctional Mom," a wonderful blogger who claims to have been putting the FUN in DysFUNctional since 1993. She seems pretty functional to me, though! I like her blog!

Well, it seems that if you give MY kid a camera... or, no, I'll rephrase that.

If MY kid uses pester power to wheedle, whine and cajole the camera off you with the reason that he knows which buttons to press, it seems he can come up with some pretty useless shots like these:

But he can also come up with the occasional gem. This one was taken at the shopping centre, with the hurried explanation he was going to chase his sister down and take a photo of her. I find this bewitching - the movement in the background, compared with the relative calm of her beautiful hair:



And after that, it can degenerate again, with shots like this:


And this self-portrait:


FLASH! Ooh, bet he couldn't see out of THAT eye for a while.

Until finally, engrossed in the camera, he ran straight into a man's legs. He looked up, startled, and promptly dropped the three-day-old camera on the floor, yielding this shot:


I thought it was dead. But yet, it lives another day.

Perhaps though, it doesn't live another day just so I can yet again see what happens IYGAKAC.

I Has NEW!

12 Megapixels! Twelve blessed megapixels! In a tiny ultra-compact piece of something better than before! I can take pictures of my kids being gorgeous! I can take videos of my kids saying amazing stuff!

Photo Mosaics

Some of you have been kind enough to say how you've liked the photo mosaics I've done of my kids, and asked how it's done.

Well, I put my photos into Photoshop, do the maths to resize them how I want, then I count the number of pixels, pull out my calculator again and I crop ... oh hang on, that was what I thought you had to do before I found the Mosaic Maker in Flickr. Try it!

I'm sure there are plenty of other websites out there to make photo mosaics with, because on other people's blogs, I see patterns of compiled photos that Flickr can't give me. So I know 'there's more than one way to skin a cat' as one of my old school teachers used to say.

But for putting my completed mosaics into something like this (below), I use Scrapblog through my Photobucket account. I haven't found they print nicely to photo paper though.

Mess Mosaic

There's just so much mess at my place right now. Like a giant has grabbed the house, given it a good shake, and replaced it. I think I've used that description before, but it still applies.

I was wondering what to do about it? Attack it madly, or make lists and work through it systematically?

I decided that I'd start by trying some glamour photography of the mess.

Hmm. Turns out it's still mess, however you look at it.

In which Sonny Ma-Jiminy thinks he sees a Gecko and tries to take a photo of it