Photo of the Day: Easter

Nothing like an old fashioned Easter Egg hunt in your back yard! For some reason the children just didn't seem to be into it much this year, they were continuing their exploration of the short film Larry Boy seeing how many times they could watch it in a day. There finally was some excitement to go outside and gather up eggs when it was discovered the the squirrels in our neighborhood have a sweet tooth for candy. The chomped on or hid for next winter at least two eggs worth.

In the picture above Punkin gathered up her eggs filled with candy and Petz toys. I kept looking for the elusive egg that contained a D3X, but it looks as if the Bunny left me wanting.

Picture captured with the Nikon D700 and finished off in Aperture

Punkin & Buddy do Easter Crafts

The joys of divorce are having your children only one weekend out of two. This being the case in my life holidays is a challenge. Without some planning simple things like Easter egg hunts or even coloring them can be a challenge. Because of this split I have not had them on Easter for a number of years. This year we have a pleasant surprise of having the bunny visit our house and I was pretty much-caught off-guard. Thankfully my spouse was not. She had gone to the store earlier in the week and picked up some Easter egg coloring tools. Friday being an “off” day from school we set out to see what color we would make them eggs.


Punkin was up early on Friday and she sounded like the proverbial “when are we going to get there” child. About every 10 minutes I would get asked. Since some necessities like eating and bathing have to be done each day, by the time we started it was long past when she wanted to be egg dunking.

Buddy had to be coaxed from a DVD he was watching Larry Boy. The DVD was in the spirit of the season; it was a Veggie Tale story. A good compromise to getting him to the table was a pair of whoopee sticks. He would have rather pounded on the table with his whoopee sticks, then color eggs, but at least it was a start. Oh, and yes they are whoopee sticks. These would be a gag gift courtesy of my wife. I do wonder what would have happened if I had purchased them.

So all the while Punkin is dunking eggs into the dye, Oh, note to the readers combine dye, whoopee sticks and 8-year old boy at your own risk! So Punkin dunks eggs Buddy smacks his stick. Each egg has to lay in the dye for 3-4 minutes and I can hear the Jeopardy music in my head, but it seems to be this odd farting noise in my ears. The farting noise was courtesy of whoopee sticks being pounded on the table by my son. Again dye and pounding on the table ramp up the fear factor quotient.

Buddy would have been happy to stop, but that would mean the chants of, “Larry Boy” would then start. Parenting in these moments is all about compromise. I was under the idea that this was family time and damn if we weren’t going to do this as a family!! Each egg dunk would mean more farting from the sticks, when the sticks didn’t hit the table then he hit himself with them. When he wasn’t smacking with the sticks then he was trying to gouge out eyeballs with the metal egg dunker. Didn’t Paas know that tiny metal devices could gouge out eyes? Each time a “put that down” escaped from Dad’s mouth, then Buddy would say, “Larry Boy”

In this test of wills I was going to win, he was going to sit-up and enjoy dunking the damn eggs into these color-coded containers. He was not going to watch Larry Boy, he was going to color eggs! Triumphant as I wanted to be, what I was really hoping for was the dye to not spill all over the floor.

As you might expect Punkin painstakingly crafted each egg to perfection. Each was different and had a different idea behind it. One used rubber bands, the next glitter; still another had stickers and multiple color combinations. Buddy dunked each one in the same color, the exact same color. I guess he was going through his green phase. I did finally get him to draw with the wax crayon on an egg so it had a design, it was however still green. When you see the pictures of the eggs however they aren’t all green. Dad had his own ideas on coloring, Buddy would point to green dad would dunk it in something else.

After four eggs and countless times listening to Larry Boy being repeated for my listening pleasure, the pounding of the farting stick as well as the terror at dye being dumped all over the floor I let Buddy head out. Punkin didn’t seem to acknowledge whether Buddy was there or not. She just kept crafting her egg one sticker at a time. With one egg left to go and Dad having not colored a single one. Buddy was relieved of duty to find Larry, Curly, Moe or possibly Shemp. I set to work putting together this last and final egg. The gesture though cheesy is true. I wrote on my egg I ❤ Punkin & Buddy with the wax crayon. It looked great in green.

Where else can I get this sort of fun?

Leaders are Readers

Leaders are Readers

Today was Leaders are Readers day at school.  When this was first announced I asked my daughter Punkin  if she would like me to read.  She was very excited, though I have been to school often for her it is always an event.  Not truly being a “leader” but in the broadest of definitions I contacted her teacher to see if I qualified.  She was more than happy to have me come in.  For the school this is a big event so I did my best to also make it an event.  

I received multiple numbers of handouts with the company that I worked for to help.  We even had some Teacher notes on each of the handouts to help her plan to use it in a lesson plan.  I received samples from multiple customers and I prepared what I thought would be an interesting speech to help explain how I use reading every day in my job.  All of this would culminate with my story of choice, The Little Engine that Could.

This book was one of my favorites growing up.  Something about that little blue engine pulling those cars up the mountain just appealed to me.  I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. That was truly the whole story to me back then.  Even today I get misty eyed just thinking about that little engine pulling those cars up the mountain all with the power of believe.

Both of my children struggle with reading.  Buddy may never be able to read a full sentence without visual clues.  With the pictures he does an excellent job of reading about 5 words.  It has taken a lot of effort in his 8 years to get him this far.  Punkin has had a bit of a struggle to.  As a parent I know trying to get buddy from one milestone to the next has been a constant challenge, I just assumed with Punkin it would just happen.  Well it doesn’t.

So she has been challenged at each corner and me I love to read always have.  It’s one of my great losses since I have had children is my lack of reading time.  Just isn’t enough time, Punkin has inherited my love of reading and she has the time, but her comprehension of reading is far better than her ability to read.  Because of this what she likes to read are multi-chapter stories and what she is able to read are simpler stories.

So she sits and she struggles and about every 5th or 6th word she has to ask for what this means or that means.  She doesn’t seem to mind so neither does Kate or myself.  We feed her the word or ask her to sound it out and the story continues. 

I don’t feel like much of a leader in reading, one child struggles because I thought it was all going to be Ok.  The other may not be able to look at anything other than picture books.  They both try though and they keep moving forward. 

For those that don’t know the story it starts with a train that is off the tracks and needs help getting over the hill.  Two other engines turn the boys and girls and a clown rather rudely and one proclaims itself too old to hall the little train over the mountain.  Finally a train that is used as a switching engine answers the call and hooks itself up to the little train and chugs it’s way up the hill.  All the way up the hill the train says, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.” 

As you might expect, this is a children’s book and not a greek tragedy, the little blue engine finds it’s way up the hill and all the dolls and toys are very happy.  The little boys and girls on the other side of the hill get all the toys and food.  We the reader get a lesson.  You have to try and you have to believe and you just might accomplish.

That truly is the crux of this story.  Believe you can and you just might, have too much pride or believe you are too old and the little children on the other side of the mountain don’t get there dolls and toys.  Simple story and a simple lesson, one that still resonates with me even today, maybe even more so.

Later that same day I stroll into my son’s classroom.  I repeat the same speech except simpler, everything is simpler there.  I look out at my audience.  In Punkin’s class I had rapt attention to each topic.  As I walked around the classroom I had each students attention.

Buddy’s class however is a bit different.  As I enter I put an FM microphone around my head so one girl can hear me.  Most of the children barely pay attention.  Still another has to listen to something.  One can’t get her picture taken.  My son sit’s plopped on my lap just happy to have Dad there.  I love my son’s classroom.  They are the epitome of the story I read to them. 

Each day they walk in and go through the same motion with just a little progress being made, but each day they try.  I can’t help but get lost in the story as I read it to them.  Maybe one of them is paying attention, but when I end they all clap, they all cheer, they pat me on the back and some ask when I will be back to read to them.  I always say soon.

I look amongst my son’s class and think they aren’t the dolls and toys on the train, they aren’t the clown nor are they the boys and girls on the other side of the hill, each of them in their own way is that little blue engine, chugging the car up the track and each says every day.  “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”

A Birthday Gift

Playing in the Leaves

I love those moments as a parent where something is unplanned, it just happens and both the parent and the children enjoy it. I try to listen to my children where fun is allowed. As I have gotten older I find that I have less and less just plain-old fun. Not to say that my life isn't full, but after I turned 40 I find that I just start falling apart. Simple things that I used to do, I don't do with the reckless abandon of childhood. I have and probably will again hurt myself. I get cautious. On these things I need my children to remind me of what "fun" really is and more importantly how simple it is to have it.

The leaves have started to fall here in Illinois. Our yard has some 6 50-60 yr old Oaks in it. Needless to say I know leaves, they aren't however friends of mine. About 4-5 times a year I have to rake up a pile that ends up being about 8 ft square and about 4 foot high. I mostly think at the end of this, boy had I been younger I would love to have played in that pile of leaves. Well that day has come. My children had occasion to help me move this pile around the yard. As you can imagine as this pile grows it gets more and more difficult to move it with a rake. Punkin had her rake and she was getting all of the leaves from behind the plants and putting them out into the grassy yard. Buddy wanted to help, with Buddy though, you never quite know what type of help to expect. He can sometimes be more of a distraction than real help. In this case though he had a spark of genius in him.

Since all the rakes were used up he walked into the shed and grabbed the first thing that came to his mind. He brought out the large broom and was going to sweep up the leaves. One can only imagine an 8-yr old boy with a broom trying to move leaves. His first attempt moved them more into the freshly raked yard, making a larger mess. After a chastise from Dad, he got going into the correct direction. For some reason this didn't work much for him. The broom was discarded after only a few moments of use. He then disappeared into the shed and out he comes with a snow shovel! The old man did not give this much more hope than the last genius plan he had concocted. I sold him short though.

He started pushing the leaves into the middle of the yard moving the large pile with some ease. I praised him for his ingenuity and was grateful that his help, was actually helpful. Punkin not wanting to miss an opportunity wanted to trade her rake with Buddy for the shovel. Buddy had nothing to to with this. Buddies attention span is more like that of a 3 year old which is about 3 minutes so after the allotted time he moved on and Punkin scraped up the shovel and went about shoveling the leaves. I will admit to some pride as all of us moved the leaves down towards the house in the back yard.

With all of the hard work done, Punkin an Buddy wanted to play in the leaves. They dove in, buried themselves, threw leaves here an there and generally just loved running and jumping into the pile. Then Punkin wanted me to join in. As some might recall early this summer we all had a running start and jumped into the water at a Wisconsin lake house we had the pleasure to stay at. Well Punkin wanted to re-create this fun, in this case though the old man was worried about falling on the ground and the leaves not breaking his fall. Well guess what, they do. You don't see pictures of this, but for a 40 year old leaves are just as much fun, if not "funner" when shared with your children. Remind me to stop being such a curmudgeon the next time please.

On to some other details. After my last set of images I had a number of comments about culling and them being OOF (out of focus) I will admit that I struggle to cull my images many times, mostly because of who I share them with. I have many times had an image that I almost through away but, when it is seen through someone elses eyes, it takes on a new light for them than it did for me. That is why I like feedback. In this case and in the Tiny Trains post. I struggle because most of the images are OOF and since in most cases it tells somewhat of a story for relatives, I keep more photos than I would normally because it shows what we did and how it looked. Now what I have on my wall is completely different. What's on the wall is not what is always online.

The bain of my pictures seems to be focus, I continually forget how fast children move and my own steadying abilities. All of these shots were taken with a flash, but the other thing I am always guilty of is trying to get a very shallow depth of field. I love good bokeh. These pictures suffer from what is in my head and what I can actually produce. Later in the series I got smart. I shot these with an 85mm lens at f2.2 on my S5. Silly. You are not going to get in-focus shots of a moving target even with AF with that tiny of DOF (depth of field) Stop down a few more stops and the background will still be blurred and you will have in-focus children. You think I would learn.

Please comment either her in the blog or on smugmug. Private email will also work.

Thanks for looking!

You can find the gallery here.

The slideshow can be found here.

How a Picture Evolves

I've had many people ask about the picture of Buddy I posted in the last blog. So, I thought I'd take a minute to let you know how that shot came to be.

I have spent much time reading two important blogs. One is Strobist and the other is David Tejada's blog. I highly recommend both blogs. Anyone can learn much from either site. I will admit that I am guilty of not reading Strobist much anymore. David Hobby was the first though to give me the creative spark that I could actually take a picture with these small pocket-sized light sources. David Tejada gives many more practical tools and applications to use them in. I will be taking a class this upcoming weekend from David T. so I can't wait to learn many new techniques. I will blog about it when I get back.

Now back to the picture of Buddy. I wanted to keep practicing single strobe lighting. I had dragged along a shoot-through umbrella and also had a very beautiful Voice Activated Lightstand and wanted to try and get a nice shot of either Buddy or Punkin in front of the setting sun. After taking more macros of flowers we moved as fast as we could to the Japanese Garden at the Chicago Botanic Gardens, there is always a lot of good spots to shoot there. We quickly moved along the trail and came to a spot next to the river that runs through the Park. In this case Punkin, who is my normal model, was sulking and hiding in the dark. I asked Buddy and he seemed very excited to have his picture taken. I was using the D3 as well as the SU-800. My VAL, was holding an SB-800 and and umbrella (isn't she talented) off of camera left. I also had the Stofen diffuser on top of the SB-800. I found a spot for Buddy to stand to try and frame him and also capture the last of the glow of the setting sun. I got a series of pictures of which this was the best of that bunch. As for one reason (already discussed in a previous blog) and for various other reasons, Buddy is 8 & he doesn't like to sit still, so this is a rare and short-lived opportunity. This is the shot right out of the camera converted to .jpg from Aperture.



From Aperture I round-tripped into Capture NX. The reason I do this is because I love Nik Control Points. Yes I could purchase Viveza from Nik for Aperture for $245, but why when I could get a much more full-featured program and even better control points with using Capture NX. That would normally cost only $189 (a nice savings over Viveza), but I had an upgrade price of ~$119. I am all about saving money. In this case the control points allow you to selectively control anything in the program. Noise Reduction, sharpening and even Nik Color Efex 3.0. I mean anything you might want to do. Truly a remarkable piece of software and I highly recommend it.

When I sized up where I would like to use this program feature, I started with the background. First, I boosted up the setting sun with a Control Point (CP) on that part of the sky. I added some warmth and also some redness. I did a matching CP in the reflection in the water. This allowed them to look similar. Then I did some spot NR on Buddy's face as well as in the sky - I was at ISO 12,800 after all! I only had NR in those areas...that is the advantage of using Capture NX. The next step was to put another CP on Buddy's face to take out some of the redness and boost contrast. After removing the redness, I added back some warmth to give him a nice glow.

After looking at the picture I realized I wanted to get rid of some of the light surrounding him, I wished I had snooted the light while on location, but with CP's I can easily adjust the amount of Brightness. I put 3 or 4 CP's around Tyler in the areas where I felt I needed to bring the Brightness down. After adjusting those CP's down, I got the final effect that you see at the top. This may sound like quite a bit of work, but with Control Points, well it was about 5 minutes (less time than it took to write it out). Everything was targeted and easy.

Why, Such a Camera!

With apologies to my wife for such a poor title. I get asked this question quite often: Wow, that's a big camera... are you a pro? Although I have spent much of my lifetime trying to take better pictures, I am indeed not a pro. But, I do like cameras. Today's camera makes taking pictures much easier than in past years. Truth be told, I spend far too much money on the cameras I choose to purchase. It is my guilty habit. As men, we all have them. I discussed in a past entry about the X-Chromosome; well, for some reason, having a Y-Chromosome means many things, like enjoying beer, grilling and a dependency on purchasing expensive electronic devices.

As habits go, mine is very bad, but (as I justify to myself) I don't watch much TV, I don't drink much, my best cooking is still at home and I don't feel the need to go and purchase a fast car. (Well not yet.. upon reaching 40 last year that desire for a convertible is gaining strength. I mean, we only go once don't we?)

I do like cameras though, and all of the toys that go along with them. A camera though, unlike many items, has a life... it takes things for memories sake. A picture is worth a thousand words they say and for me that's a small amount.

Above is a picture of my son. I almost always call him Buddy. Here we are at the Botanic Gardens. When some people see this, they may think something like "That is a nice picture." But what I remember is how he patiently stood there and did his best at posing. You see, standing still has not been his strong suit, but he has gotten so much better. His sister, Punkin... (yes with an "n" and not an "mp". Unlike where the link will take you I would never chuck her!) She wouldn't allow me to take the picture with her in it. She was upset about something or another that she wanted to do, but Buddy just stood there, smiled at the voice activated light stand (Kate) and couldn't have been more happy.
Now some may think that I could have taken this with just any camera, but truth is that I couldn't, it is taken at ISO 12,800! Try that with your point and shoot. The camera and the technology does the heavy lifting here, it's a D3. I couldn't have gotten this shot or this memory with any other camera.

I now share with you a nice Lego structure courtesy of Punkin. What I remember about this series is how carefully she put all of these together and presented it to me in it's finished form carefully displaying it on my desk. She said, "Daddy can we take a picture?" I of course was in the middle of work, trying to multi-task and be superdad as well as a world class employee, on these days it always seems as if my children get the short end of the stick. I wish I made different choices, and sometimes I do, but today I didn't. I put her off, I asked her to wait. Later in the day and true to my promise I went to take pictures of the wonderful looking and daintily built structure. I could have just popped a picture with any camera, but wanted something worthy of the art that my daughter crafted and this, of course, again meant using that same D3. I mean she made it herself didn't she?

As I started carefully moving the structure one of the walls collapsed and was now detached from the rest of the building. Then as I went to repair that, well the other side fell over and then next thing I knew the whole top had caved in onto itself and I was left looking at no longer a world class abstract art piece worthy of some placement in front of a City Center, Bank or Museum, but 4 clumps that I had no clue how to put back together. Well what is a father to do in this moment when he has made a promise and now can't fulfill it? Pile it up on his desk and announce that it was time to eat lunch and hope she will forget! So as we are plowing through our bologna sandwiches, drinking our milk and eating a wonderful tasting and somewhat healthy Sun Chip, she leans over and announces to me and Buddy. "Heh Daddy let's go and take some picture of my building!" Now in a moment of weakness and not wanting to disappoint my daughter - who I love dearly - I thought, "Well I can blame it on Buddy, since he can't talk very well he can't quite deny convincingly enough that he didn't do it!" Then I got ahold of myself and realized that I had to set an example. I carefully looked at my daughter and with all of the guilt that I truly felt told her that, "We had a problem." In my head I kept hearing Tom Hanks utter the infamous "Houston" before it. For me it was along the same degree of problem as NASA had. We left the kitchen table to show her the rubble that I had created and as we started walking up the stairs I started to explain to her what had happened. I went into detail to show her how upset I was that I couldn't put it all together so we could get a picture. As I arrived in my office I sat in my chair and picked up the many pieces of the "building" I was waiting for the blow back as I had let my daughter down. Punkin picked up the pieces, jumped into my lap and gave me a big hug, she told me, "That's OK Daddy, I can put it back together." She also let me know that despite my wanton disregard for her art that, " I still love you." She kept hugging me for quite some time. She told me after a bit that she had the same thing happen when she tried to build it and that I had to be careful because it was very delicate. She also reassured me that she could get it back together so we could get a picture.

As you see from the pictures she got it back together and I attended to capturing this piece of art for posterity. Captured at ISO 6400 with available light which only the D3 could do. So while some might only see the cost, I grab onto the memories of that "shot that almost wasn't" and the daughter who made it so easy to tell that "superdad" IS only human.