I saw three tiny caterpillars on my dill plants one day and thought I’d wait and see how big they got. For a couple of days they stayed tiny and didn’t really do any visible damage to my dill. Then we went away to Austin for two days to go see Damien Jurado in concert, and when we came back they had devoured one whole plant and had moved on to the other two. They had also at least quadrupled in size. It was at this point that I decided to research to see what they were. They are the caterpillars of the black swallowtail butterfly, which as it turns out is very beautiful. Upon researching and finding that they feed on plants from the parsley family (Umbelliferae) , I decided that instead of killing them or leaving them to destroy all of my dill that I would move them to my parsley plants, which were very large and unlikely to see any real damage in the final couple of days of the caterpillar stage of the butterfly’s life cycle. Sure enough, they only stayed on the parsley two more days, molted and let out it’s last big poo or whatever it was, then moved off to find a place to go into it’s chrysalis stage. I’ve not seen any of the chrysalis or any resulting butterflies yet, but I am still hoping.
I would also like to note that this is one of my first opportunities to show off the macro capabilities of my newest lens, the Sigma 18-50mm f2.8 EX DC Macro HSM. I purchased this lens in February because I needed something wide, and I really wanted something that had 2.8 throughout. I have been very impressed with it’s build quality and the quality of the images I have taken with it. It was an added bonus that it is a macro lens.
When you first become a parent you hear from everyone around you about how fast time flies with your kids…but there is no real way to be prepared for how quickly a baby develops. It seems every single day is a new milestone. The way Parker looks at the world is so fun…everything is new and exciting to him. This past couple of weeks have been pretty big in his life. First, his first two bottom teeth popped out. I couldn’t help but capture he silly little toothy grin. The crazy thing is that since I took this picture last week, he has already had another tooth (upper front right) come through, with the next one about to come out! Not to mention the fact that this last week he actually finally figured out how to crawl… this is both an exciting and scary thing. I’m so excited to watch him move and be active and play, but at the same time now we have to finally “baby proof” our house. He seems to already have a knack for finding that one thing in the room that he shouldn’t be playing with. He is fascinated with Izze (our cat) and the cords for the blind in the living room…both things that we really don’t want him playing with unsupervised. Oh well, we know that parenting is an adventure. Christina and I keep telling each other how amazed we are by how much we love him. We know we are so blessed to have such a healthy, happy little boy
I’m going to do my best to revive one of my favorite parts of blogging… Flickr Friday. The reasons are many: adds frequency to blogging, gives me a steady topic, I love taking pictures and showing them off, I need something to motivate me to continue to blog and to take more pictures.
Ok, so I missed doing a Flickr Friday post. Next I thought, ok I’ll do a Flickr Saturday post. No go. Finally it is a Flickr Sunday, and this time I’m going to post, I promise.
My family game to visit last week so that Melia, Amanda, Audrey, Matt, and Kade could meet Parker for the first time and so that Mom, Dad, and James could see him and everyone else again. It was crazy fun having everyone together in my neck of the woods. This is the first time since my wedding that everyone has been together in San Antonio (everyone except Mike that is…we missed you).
Here are a couple more pics from the visit. Be sure to check out more on my Flickr page.
If you’ve read this blog at all for even a short period of time, then you will know that I love really good photography. (I try to take pictures myself, with questionable results sometimes) One of my favorite photographers has got to be Wendi Poole. Wendi is the photographer who shot our wedding and recently started a new photography business with a friend. I’m not sure how long her website has been up, but I just got a google alert on my name that directed me to a post on her new photo blog. It is just starting, but I am sure there will be lots of good things to come. If you are interested in photography or if you are in need of a great photographer in the San Antonio area I highly reccomend Wendi.
I just found some of the best inspiration for photographing Parker and any kids that follow him. This guy has created a photoblog of his girls and takes some of the funniest, most creative pictures I’ve seen. It gets my mind churning for ideas of pictures to take of Parker. The thing is, he pretty much only sleeps right now and he can’t really hold his head up. I’m not going to let that stop me.
In case you haven’t looked at my flickr page recently, you should go check out the pictures we just took for his announcement that we are designing ourselves. Christina was an amazing help, and Parker really was very cooperative for an 18 day old.
I tried hard to come up with a cool, catchy title, and that was all I could muster. Hopefully the content will make up for the lameness. With Parker on the way, we knew we had to transform one of our extra bedrooms into the baby room, and would consolidate the guest bedroom and office into one room. I, of course, couldn’t do this the normal way, and wanted to do my best to document the transformation of the room.
First, I was a little late getting started. I had moved the guest bed out by the time I decided to start this endeavor, so that was never captured. My first thought was to shoot time lapse video using a video camera. The problem with that is that the work being done on the room was going to take place over quite a long period of time. I also wanted to be able to control when the camera was capturing, so I wouldn’t record tons of dead time. My final solution came in the form of a still camera. Christina and I own 2 cameras. My beloved Canon Digital Rebel XT and our trusty Canon S1IS, the camera we got as a Christmas present the year we got married. We had thought the S1IS had disappeared for over a year, only for it to show up (under the seat of Christina’s car) after we had replaced it. So it had been relegated to be the backup camera, the camera to take to the beach when on vacation, etc… Being a Canon, I was able to install software on my iMac to control it remotely via USB. I was even able to capture the images directly on the computer.
In order to mount the camera, I used a shelf bracket, the head from an old tripod, and some screws from the garage. I wanted maximum room coverage, so I put it in the corner by the door. I also needed continuous power so I wouldn’t have to keep taking it down to change batteries and then guess at the correct replacement of the camera, causing tons of movement in the final video.
After getting the camera up and taking a few pics with the iMac, I realized that I wasn’t going to be happy with the focal length. The shot was not near wide enough. I could only see maybe half of the room. I knew I had an old, cheap video wide angle adapter, so I fished it out of the garage gear stash and worked on a way to attach it to the S1IS. I ended up using the cheapest, easiest, and most universal method to attach it: duct tape.
The biggest problem with this (other than how it looks), is that whenever the camera turns off, it attempts to pull the lens back into the body of the camera. When it can’t do this, it freaks out. I had to untape the wide angle and reboot the camera a couple of times in the setup. The final solution was to always keep the camera on, always keep the USB plugged in, and never turn off the computer. If I broke any of the rules, the setup would be ruined. Once during the renovation the wide angle fell off, so I climbed up on a ladder and retaped it. I can’t really tell in the final video the moment that this happened, which is a good thing. So now, any time that I started working in the room I would set the interval timer shooting mode to shoot every X seconds (15 seconds usually, but sometimes more or less depending on how quick the work I was doing went). I was nearly done with the room when the camera flaked out on me and quit working. Oh well, I’ll post some real pictures of the room with everything else in it later. Here is the final video:
So in a rare impulsive move, I decided that I wanted to go camping. Christina had to go to T-Bar-M with her 5th graders on Wednesday so I was going to be home alone. With spring coming so early in South Texas and as a result summer coming so early and lasting so long, I knew if I wanted to enjoy the outdoors I needed to do it soon or I would have to endure the heat.
James and I were planning on going to Enchanted Rock to camp, but by the time I got done working on and showing Easter videos we were not going to get to Enchanted Rock until after sundown. The backup plan was to go and stay at Guadalupe River State Park. It wasn’t too bad a back up plan. I really enjoyed getting a chance to “unplugg” for at least a short amount of time (although I did post a tweet one time while out). We took our time doing everything, and the most eventful times were spent preparing meals and hiking along the river.
My favorite part was taking pictures. After taking too many HDR pics the last couple of weeks, I wanted to simplify my image capturing process. I switched the camera to shoot JPGs instead of RAW and used the in camera black and white setting. It was really freeing to go and shoot without having to be concerned with editing. I shot most of my pics with my nifty 50mm. I need to go back to simplicity every once in a while to keep myself balanced.
I’ve become a pretty serious Google Reader user. As you can see below, I’ve got 90 subscriptions and I can’t keep up. That’s pretty hard for me considering my obsessive habit of trying to keep my email completely free of any unread mail. It pains me every time I look at Reader and see all of those unread feeds. I’m getting more an more used to it, but as a result of having so many feeds, I’ve been neglecting one folder I have titled “Inspiration”. The funny thing is that right now I only have 1 feed in that folder, Motionographer. Motionographer states they seek to be an inspiration to filmmakers, annimators, and designers, of which I consider myself to fall somewhere within those groups. Tonight I started weeding through some reels they linked to.
Lindsay Daniels really has a great reel that I watched probably 5 times just to take it all in. It inspires me to take some of the strobist stuff I’ve been learning for photography and to translate that care and planning in a shot into video.
I need to take more time to be inspired I think. I spend too much time trying to create and don’t sit back and soak things in enough.
I have been reading on strobist.com a lot lately. I have been trying to get my own set-up to do some off camera flash work, and I have finally got enough pieces to get started. I got a gift card from my friends for my birthday that bought me my new Vivitar 285HV and I bought some ebay Cactus V2 wireless triggers. I’ve never used even an on camera flash, so the whole light balancing with a flash is new to me. I’m having fun, and I’m learning…the perfect combination. This is one of my first attempts. Many many more to come.
