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drorzel | September 9, 2015Over at whatever, John Scalzi posts a lot of sunset photos. I don't get a lot of those, because for most of the year I need to be dealing with the kids-- wrangling them home from day care, making dinner, getting them to bed-- during the time when the sunset looks pretty. It's hard to appreciate the evening sky when SteelyKid and the Pip are squabbling over whose turn it is to pick what they watch on TV.
But I get a lot of opportunity at the other end of the day, since for a good chunk of the year it's still dark when I get up to walk Emmy. So today's photo of the day is an inverse Scalzi--…
drorzel | September 8, 2015I'm playing around with the various camera lenses I own, which include a rarely-used fixed 50mm focal length. This is "rarely used" because a good deal of what I use the camera for is taking pictures of the kids, and the separation needed to get them in frame with this lens is really difficult to maintain.
The cool thing about it is that it has a really large aperture, so you can get an extremely narrow depth of field, which makes for some cool focus effects. The lack of zoom capability is a bit of a challenge, in that if you want to frame a shot a particular way, you need to physically walk…
drorzel | September 7, 2015Having made a passing mention of the lake in my home town yesterday, it seems appropriate to post a photo of the lake itself. So, here you go.
Whitney Point Lake, from the dam.
It's been a very long, hot day, coming back to Chateau Steeypips from the weekend away, and then taking the kids to the last day of the outdoor pool at the JCC for this year. So that's pretty much all you get.
drorzel | September 6, 2015Today's photo-of-the-day is of the point that gives my home town of Whitney Point its name- the Tioughnioga (left) and Otselic (right) rivers come together here, providing as good a reason as any to locate a town here back in the late 1700's. This was originally named "Patterson's Point"; Whitney was an innkeeper who ran a mail drop, and people inevitably got sick of addressing things to "Whitney's Inn at Patterson's Point," so the name got condensed.
There's a dam on the Otselic now (for values of "now" dating back to before WWII-- it was started as a New Deal labor project), and my parents…
drorzel | September 5, 2015Today was a busy day-- the kids played around my parents' house for a while, then we went to the Field Days in Johnson City to ride carnival rides for a bit. I have some decent pictures and a bit of video from all that. For the official photo-a-day picture, though, we'll go with something kind of random, namely the weather station my dad has in the bac yard.
The weather station my father has in the back yard.
Why? I dunno. I find the shape kind of interesting, and I liked the way the drops of dew on it caught the light. And, you know, this sort of exercise is about finding interesting…
drorzel | September 4, 2015It's Labor Day weekend here in the US, so we've come down to my parents' for an end-of-summer weekend. The kids are, of course, thrilled to be visiting Grandma and Grandpa's house where they can bask in the warmth of... Transformers cartoons on Grandma and Grandpa's Netflix subscription.
(I'd say "Kids these days," but if I'm totally honest, I would have to admit that getting to watch WPIX was a highlight of visits to my grandmother on Long Island back when I was their age...)
Anyway, a lot of the pictures I end up taking look basically like this: quick snapshots of the kids doing whatever.…
drorzel | September 3, 2015Last weekend, while the kids were at my parents', Kate and I decided to go over to Williamstown and look at some art. We originally intended to go to the Clark Art Institute, but it was mobbed, so we drove on to MassMoCA instead.
I told several different people about that, all of whom said "Oh, did you go to the Van Gogh show?" Which made me want to see the Van Gogh show, and since I'm on sabbatical and not teaching, I drove over there and actually went to the Clark this time. (Which was still mobbed, but I got there early enough to get in...)
The Van Gogh exhibit was, in fact, very…
drorzel | September 2, 2015I spent a while this morning typing on my laptop on the deck, and brought the new camera out with me for occasional procrastination. The shady spot at that hour has a nice view of the bird feeder, and I snapped a few shots of these guys feeding (using a telephoto lens):
Two birds on our backyard feeder; not sure of the species.
(I cropped and scaled this, and did the auto-level color correction in GIMP.)
The one on the left is a house sparrow, I believe, and we have dozens of them around. I don't think I've ever seen the one on the right before, though, and have no idea what species it is…
drorzel | September 1, 2015Today, I officially stopped being department chair, and started my sabbatical leave. I also acquired a new toy:
My new camera, taken with the old camera.
My old DSLR camera, a Canon Rebel XSi that I got mumble years ago, has been very good for over 20,000 pictures, but a few things about it were getting kind of flaky-- it's been bad at reading light levels for a while now, meaning I'm constantly having to monkey with the ISO setting manually, then forgetting to change it back when I move to a brighter location and taking a bunch of pictures where everything is all blown out. It also…