a less productive post

i haven't really accomplished much lately, unless you consider watching four episodes of lost "much." mr. z has been out of town since Sunday, trying to find us a house to rent in our new locale, and according to an email he sent last night, he found one. yes he had to email because apparently Lubbock, Texas is the one place in America in which Verizon does not work. at all. good thing we switched to America's largest network then...

anyway, i've been enjoying my alone time by sleeping diagonally across the bed, not cleaning up the kitchen, and watching Lost. its been pretty sweet, but less than productive. In my defense, i did pick up a couple of shifts at work and got a good run in with Sonja so it hasn't been all bad. And I finished a super-secret project.


i can't talk about it yet, but i LOVE it. it was a new pattern from a new source, which i will share in the next few day. but for now, this is all you get.

Holy Craft!

Or "my wedding box just threw up all over my dining room!"

I have been a crafting maniac the last few days. Crossed off the "List of Shit that must be done before we take a load of wedding junk to NY in July" (yes, the list title is longer than the list)

1. Made three table runners, ten feet long by 15 inches wide. For the cake table, the guestbook table, and the gift table. The pinning took FOREVER. On the other hand, I am now excellent at sewing in a straight line.



2. Table signs... I still haven't decided if we're going to assign seating or not. Seems like a lot of extra hassle, so we may just reserve a few in the front for our immediate family and the families/significant others of the party. They are all trees, you know with the whole fall leaf thing we have going on, however, there is a Pansy table for anyone who might be concerned.


3. Reserved signs for the front few pews.


4. Matchbook favors. Ok, I so I didn't exactly craft these, but we did have to select the little clip-art decoration for the top. The leaf and writing are a metallic copper. We figured if we were going to have sparklers, it would probably be a good idea to have some way to light them. And as far as favors go, these were far less expensive than most.


5. Corn-hole boards. I don't have a picture of them, but I painted the boards and sewed three sets of corn-bags. The boards need another coat, but considering its raining (AGAIN) it will likely be a while before they get one. I wasn't sure how to paint them, and all red (as is the standard here in OSU country) seemed like an awful lot of red. I ended up getting an off white as the base color and a nice red to put something else on there. Will probably leave them plain for the reception though.

For those of you feeling skeptical, I have come across a number of brides who had corn-hole and other games at their receptions... the way i see it, i bet we have more people playing corn-hole than we do dancing. and those boards are way cheaper than the DJ. For those of you thinking "what the holy-hell is corn-hole?" its sort of like bean bag toss, but usually with more beer involved.

The photography bug

It would seem that the photography bug is going around. I'm getting more visitors and some are even coming from other sites that have linked to me because of my photography series. Even Mr. Z has gotten in on it, and he's now taking his own pictures for his food blog.

But watch out, because there's another new photographer on the block, and she's pretty good. You may remember from the post with the pictures of my nieces, that Thing 1 had taken a really awesome picture of Thing 2. Actually, she took a couple but I only posted one because i didn't want to be shown up on my own blog. I also have a really great shot of her brother that she took a couple years ago (yes, she would have been about four at the time). So yesterday I get the cutest email in the history of emails. Its from Thing 1 and it says "I am getting A camra I am ralleay icsidid"

Apparently she's been really into the camera since our visit and has since asked for one for her birthday. it was hilarious to watch her taking pictures with mine... she was so careful, and she took to it quite naturally. i can't wait to see what she does with her own. unless she's better than me... in which case we'll never mention this again.

and sort of on a similar topic, i finally ordered some cards from the printer using one of my photos. the paper has a linen finish, so its not shiny like a photograph. they are quite professional looking, if i do say so myself. I have to give them credit though, White House Custom Color is a most excellent printing company.



I already have plans for a few of them, but I will likely be posting some for sale in the etsy shop at some point as well. I'll be donating a set to AllMediocre for Meghan to use as a prize, so if you haven't been there yet, go check it out. Still waiting to hear back from her, so I don't know how or when they'll be given away, but I'll let you know when I do.

Photography nitty gritty #5: Shutter Speed and Blur

Previously we talked about aperture and how adjusting it changed both your exposure, and the look of your photo. This time we're going to talk about the second component of exposure, the shutter speed.

Shutter speed is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, the speed of your shutter. It refers to how long the shutter stays open, exposing the film/sensor to light through the lens. The shutter speed is denoted in fractions of a second. So a shutter speed of 125 would be 1/125th of a second and a shutter speed of 250 would be 1/250th of a second. Stay with me here... that means that 250 is faster than 125 and therefore 250 lets in less light than 125 because the shutter is open a shorter length of time. Am I making sense??

Try putting your camera on manual mode (M) and set your aperture to whatever you want. then leave the aperture alone and don't change it. Try taking several pictures at various shutter speeds and see how it changes. An image taken at 1/60th of a second should be brighter than the same one taken at 1/125th of a second. Likewise, one taken at 1/250th of a second should be darker than the one at 1/125th. (Keep in mind this exercise will only work in Manual mode... in the other modes your camera will be making adjustments to keep the exposure from changing)

Like aperture, changing your shutter speed not only affects your exposure, it can also change the look of your image; but this time, instead of bokeh, its blur that is influenced by changing the settings.

Blur seems pretty self-explanatory, right? Its blurry. That infuriating thing that happens when you're trying to take pictures with your point and shoot and the shutter takes forever and its kind of dark inside the house and instead of capturing little Jimmy as he blows out his birthday candles, you get a jumbled mess of smeary looking colors in which nothing is distinguishable. (Longest run-on, and possibly incomplete, sentence ever right there...) Right, that's one kind of blur, but its not the only kind.

#1 Camera shake... this is the bad blur. This means that your shutter was open longer than you could hold your camera steady. The general rule for DSLR's is not to shoot hand-held (as opposed to using a tripod) at a shutter speed longer than your focal length. So for my 50mm lens i wouldn't want to shoot at anything longer than 1/60th of a second. If i was using a 200mm lens, i would probably stay away from anything longer than 1/125th or 1/250th.

Now thats just a rough estimate,. i've gotten perfectly acceptable photos at 1/30th using my 50mm. as you get more comfortable with your camera and shooting style, you'll learn where your limits are.

here's what camera shake looks like.

this first one was shot at 1/60th sec. there is no shake in this one, its for comparison.

this was shot at 1.3 seconds, which on my camera display reads as 1"3.
definitely some shake here.

everyone's ended up with a few shots like this that make them want to throw their camera

this was actually a faster shutter speed than the previous. this was 1/3rd of a second. but i also accidentally moved the camera. i wanted to show the difference between actually moving the camera and "shake." With shake, it may feel like you held the camera steady but tiny movements caused by breathing or slight shifting can still register if the shutter speed is long enough.

#2 Motion blur... this can be good or bad depending on what you're looking for, but it has nothing to do with your inability to hold the camera still. this has to do with how fast something is moving versus how fast the shutter speed is. 1/250th of a second is generally fast enough to freeze most ordinary things. If you're shooting race cars, you're going to need something a little faster, but if you're shooting race cars, you probably don't need to be reading this particular series.

Back in the days when i shot high school football, i often used shutter speeds upwards of 1/1000th of a second to freeze both the players and the ball. My camera also shot like eleventy billion frames per second back in those days too, but i've moved on (sorta). if you have motion blur, everything else within the depth of field will be sharp, but whatever is moving... kid, dog, whatever, will be blurry. if you want to avoid this, use a faster shutter speed. if you want more blur, use a slower speed.

i don't have any kids and since no one took me up on my offer of a free children's portrait session in the greater Columbus area, i had to find something else to blur.

some examples... this was 1/200th. see how it freezes the motion of the water?

that little round thing in the bottom corner is one of the kids that was playing in the water. i don't know if i'd have dunked my head in there... ick

now the much longer shutter speed of 1/2 second. everything else is still sharp and in focus, only the moving water is blurred.


on a completely unrelated note, this is Hayden Falls. The last time i went here was sometime in the fall of 2004 and we had to essentially scale down a cliff while praying we didn't drop any of our equipment. since then they have made it a metropark and added stairs and a walkway. Its all cool and shady and the waterfall throws off a lovely mist. Aside from the occasional whiff au dead fish, its really a pleasant place. There were a handful of moms with children there and as i was leaving there was a photographer and model preparing for a shoot in the pool at the foot of the falls. its turned in to quite the popular place, and it makes for some fantastic pictures.

#3 Out of focus blur. This too has nothing to do with shutter speed, but it is another type of "blur" i suppose. it just means you didn't focus on the right thing. often something else in the photo will be in focus. this blur will look a lot like bokeh because it is. we'll talk about focus later.

decisions, decisions...

i think i mentioned previously that i had to figure out something to do for boutonnières for both my dad and mr. z's dad. so i made a trek up to JoAnn's and Michael's with Jenny on Saturday. there wasn't any real plan so i kinda just grabbed whatever look fall-ish and appealing and figured it find a way to put it together later.

after playing around with everything i'd bought and the vast collection of fall crap i'd managed to put together over the last few months, i came up with a couple of ideas. i also realized that i don't think the rose therussian made for the groom's boutonnière is going to work.

nothing to indicate scale, but its substantially larger than the other options

its just too big. i feel like it needs something additional, but anything big enough to match the scale is going to have to be equally large, thereby making the overall product gigantic. hmph.

in the process of messing around with everything else i came up a couple of possibilities. originally i was going to do a different bout for each dad but now i'm thinking this one for mr. z...


the wheat with the orange looks really good with the dark brown fabric of mr. z's suit. this one's just a mock up. the real one will have a much nicer looking bow.

and one of the following for the dads.

i saw a bout using a pine cone on the wedding style website and it was cute, though rather cumbersome. so i was delighted to find that one of the fall "packs" i got at JoAnn's had wee little pine cones in it. they are quite cute, you know, for a pine cone.


the berries are more orangey-yellow, and a bit less red, than they look here. i'm torn between the two options. i do really like the berries alone, but then i think maybe its a bit plain and needs something. but i think it looks nice with the pine cone too, though here its just smooshed together and sitting on top, not actually arranged to look its best. in this one i did actually make an attempt to make a nice bow, though i haven't trimmed the ends yet.

what do you think? and while i happily take into account the opinions of friends, and even strangers on the web, i know my family is out there (yes, i'm talking to all of you). see right down there where it says "0 comments" or "1 comment" or whatever? just click on it and follow the directions.

so many crafts, so little time

for once i actually had a hard time deciding what to blog about. true it helps that its been a few days since my last post. knitting, sewing, craft shopping, wedding... about the only thing that wasn't a possibility was the next photography installment, primarily because i haven't done any sample shots for the next topic.

but while we're on the subject, i've only really gotten feedback from one person. if there is anyone that's come here for the photography explanations, i'd love to hear what you think. i'm trying to keep them from getting too bogged down in technical details while still actually explaining how it works. is it too confusing? would you rather have less detail and more tips? more camera specific stuff? i'm open to talking about whatever, really. i do actually plan to talk a little about lighting and composition once i finish with all the exposure stuff, so if that's what you're after, stick around. its coming, i swear.

but anyway, i decided to go with knitting today, both wedding related and not.



This is Soft Wave, a 100% cotton 1-ply from Queensland Collection. It has sort of a nubbly texture that knits up quite nicely. We shall see how it is to work with. I bought it from Purl's, a really nice little yarn shop in Asheville, NC.

see what i mean by "nubbly?"

We were in town for an evening wedding so we had all morning to kill. My mom and I left Mr. Z and my dad on a bench in the sunshine while we wandered around petting the yarns and chatting with the woman who ran the store. There really is something magical about sticking your hands into giant piles of soft fluffy yarns in all the colors of the rainbow. i have a special thing for teals and greens. but this time i refrained, and in the end only bought this (albeit 10 skeins of it) for a very special project.

and this, of course, is the fourth and final wrap... just in case the orange didn't give it away.

not my most artistic photo,
but in progress shots are hard to make pretty

the Cheshire Stole, while pretty, just didn't keep me interested. So, while at Purl's I also found a pattern for Fiber Trend's Estonian Lullaby Blanket. I modified the stitch count to make it into a wrap, which consists of making it narrower and longer, and so far its worked out nicely. I think the stitch pattern fits better with previous wraps as well. It does have a knitted border on both ends though, which meant that I had to learn a new trick and do a provisional cast on. hopefully that doesn't bite me in the ass when i try to take it out later.

i will say i am surprised that i don't hate this yarn, or lace knitting, yet. i'll be glad when i'm done, but i really enjoy the lace. and luckily this one is knitting up really quickly. that may have something to do with the fact that i have watched the entire first season of Lost over a matter of days. you can get a lot of knitting done watching 17 episodes of anything. i have to admit though, i'm a little bit in love with Charlie... in spite of the heroin addiction. oh wait, what?? he's not real? damn.

Photography nitty gritty #4: Aperture Part II

So we ended last time saying that you can't just run around changing your aperture willy-nilly. Well, I mean, you can... its your camera, you can do whatever the heck you want. but if you're going for a certain look, you can't. Why not? Because, aperture controls the "depth-of-field" in a photograph, and along with that, the bokeh.

Depth-of-field (or DoF from here on out) refers to how much of the photograph is in focus. When you focus on a certain object or area, there is a range both in front of and behind that point of focus that remains sharp. Your camera can only technically focus at one distance, and from there the sharpness fades into blurriness, both in front of and behind that point. How quickly it fades into blurriness is controlled by the aperture.

Very wide apertures (again, small number/large opening) have a narrow DoF. That means that when you focus on a single point there will only be a short distance in front of and behind that which will remain in focus. for example, with an aperture of 2.0 i can focus on kodiak's eyes and while they will be sharply in focus, his nose will be blurry.

Very small apertures have a much wider DoF. With an aperture of f/22, if i focus on kodiak's eyes, his nose will certainly be in focus. so will the fence behind him and probably the hospital across the street.

Not making any sense? How about a visual?

Let's start with f 2.0; this is a wide aperture and therefore a narrow depth of field


first we focus on Ms. Scarlet here in the front. as you can see, Mrs. Peacock is blurry, and Col. Mustard is blurrier yet. That's because the focus is in the front, and the subjects get blurrier the farther they are from the plane of focus.


now, if we focus on Mrs. Peacock, the focus is in the center and both Ms. Scarlet and Col. Mustard are equally blurry as they are both equal distance from the plane of focus. (more or less, i didn't bother with the ruler)


and lastly, focusing on Col. Mustard gives us the exact opposite of the first photo. In this case, Ms. Scarlet is the blurriest since she is the farthest from the plane of focus.

Now lets look at a small aperture, f 22, which gives us a much wider DoF.

focused on Mrs. Peacock

focused on Ms. Scarlet

focused on Col. Mustard

As you can see, it doesn't really matter who I focused on. At such a small aperture, all three of them are in focus, regardless of where the actual plane of focus was.

Your depth of field is also determined by how far away you are from whatever you focused on. in the following two images, Col. Mustard remained in the same place, only the camera moved. the aperture was f 2.0 for both pictures.


Notice in the first picture that the brick in the background, while still recognizable, is pretty blurry. In the second picture, even though the distance between the wall and Col. Mustard hasn't changed, the brick is much clearer. This is because in the first picture the two distances are almost equal, whereas in the second picture the wall is much closer to the Col. than the camera was.

So depth-of-field refers to how much of the image is in focus. what about the part that's not in focus? that, my friends, is bokeh. and that is my favorite part of photography. bokeh is that beautiful blurry background you get with a wide aperture.


the area behind this flower was all sorts of bushes, grasses, and plants. had i used a smaller aperture, it would have been visible and very distracting. but by opening up to a wider aperture, it all blurred out into a soft, green haze.

the point...

if you're wondering what all this means to you, here's how to apply it to your pictures.

• if you want a nice blurry background, you need a wider aperture
• for more blur, move your subject farther away from whatever is in the background and move closer to your subject.
  
• if you are taking a picture of two kids (for example) and one is sitting slightly in front of the other, you may need to stop down a little bit (one or two f-stops) so that both subjects are in focus.

um, yeah. that's all i can think of to say about aperture and DoF for now. Here's something to ponder until next time. If you think you know the answer, feel free to chime in. What if you have decided an aperture of f 2.8 gets you the nice blurry background you want when taking pictures of your little one(s), but your exposure meter says that such a wide aperture will cause your picture to be terribly overexposed. What to do?

p.s. Canon, don't forget to send me that 24-70mm L lens to review. Canon? Can you hear me??

Proceed to #5 Shutter Speed and Motion Blur