No One Can Understand you Smothered in Frogs, My Head Spins 355 Degrees, and Death Rains Down From the Sky

If you remember, I went out somewhat spontaneously on Saturday night to take pictures of the super moon with a couple of other photographers. Well, they’re photographers anyway. They let me tag along and clean their lenses and get glasses of water for them when they’re thirsty.

Today, I finally had time to play with my images and see if I had anything worth showing to anyone else.  Actually, I didn’t have time to play, I made time.  I was going to dust the house, but I couldn’t reach the dusting stuff, which is a story for another day, so with all that free time I tinkered with my pictures.

At first I wasn’t sure I had anything that was usable.   I’ve avoided taking  moon pictures in the past. First, it’s been cold at night, and second, moon pictures are kinda boring unless you know what you’re doing.  And I don’t.

So, standing in the dark in the middle of a Gettysburg battlefield, I realized I didn’t have a game plan for taking moon shots.  Other than spending a huge amount of time hopping about batting at my legs and rifling through my hair looking for ticks, I spent most of my time messing with my tripod; it’s too high, it’s too low, I forgot to tighten the legs so they’re sinking down, why can’t I loosen this knob?, etc.  The tripod is surly and lazy and doesn’t work well with others.  With my remaining 10 minutes, I took 50 pictures.  I like about three of them.

I certainly didn’t get any shots of the moon looking super big.  I’m realizing now that you have to find something so far away that it looks teensy-weensy on the horizon.  Then, when the moon is next to it, the moon looks big in comparison.  All you’d have to do then, is to zoooooom in on the teensy-weensy thing and the moon.  By zooming, no one would be able to tell that the thing on the horizon was really teensy-weensy.

Oh well.  No super huge moon shots.  But I did manage to get a picture that was just nice, with a normal looking moon.

This is a monument in Gettysburg of a Native American standing outside his teepee.  If you’re interested in seeing what it looks like in daylight click on this link. 

The sky was not that blue, but in the original shot it’s hard to make out the monument against the grey-black sky.

Original, unedited

So I added the blue, but now you can really see the noise (graininess), especially to the left of the tee-pee.

No vignette: can see noise on the edges

So, I added a vignette. Scroll back up to see the final version and compare. A vignette is the black fuzzy-ish circle around the edges of the picture.  The vignette covers the noisy left side of the picture and draws your eye to the middle, where there isn’t as much noise.  Sneaky.

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So, Darling Husband turns to me today and says, “So….would you want a new camera for Mother’s Day or would you rather get it later?”

What?!

That’s like when Pharoah asked Moses to get rid of the plagues and Moses said, “When do you want to get rid of them?” and Pharoah said, “MmmMmMm” and Moses said, “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you, muffled under all those frogs,” and Pharoah barked out, “Tomorrow!”

Lesson learned from goofy Pharaoh; don’t ask for something tomorrow when you can have it today!  Yes, I want the camera for Mother’s Day and not a day later!  What a silly, silly question!

This time around, deciding on a new camera is eeeasy.  Back in November I needed to upgrade to a new camera and had no idea what I wanted, only that it would cost money.  And Darling Husband and I are nothing if we’re not cheap thrifty.  The idea of spending lots of money on something that I didn’t even know if I would like/want/need drove me just about batty.  And me being batty drove Darling Husband batty.

But now I know what I want, and this whole “Let’s buy a new camera” experience is much more fun this time around.  (Nikon D5100)

I had sort of hoped that this photography hobby would fade after awhile, but instead it’s getting worse.  For instance, at the comedy show last night, some guy came skulking down the aisle and sat on the ground right next to Boy9 and took pictures.  Photographers always skulk.  We took an entire month of Photo Club meetings just to learn how to skulk.  Kevin’s pretty good at skulking.  When Melissa pulled a tick out of her hair on Saturday night (really, she did, it was horrible!) Kevin skulked up behind me and touched my head so I’d think I had a tick, too.  I couldn’t help but be impressed with his skulking skills.  I think he was impressed with my shrieking skills.  (Melissa also had a bat in her hair, but that’s her story to tell.)

Anyway, I missed half the comedy show because I was too busy staring at the guy’s camera and trying to figure out which model it was (it was a Canon, I do know that) and wishing I could pull him aside and ask him what he thought of his camera.

Aside: Here’s a picture of the stage from Boy9’s point of view.  It’s tough to be short and never knowing when someone tall will sit in front of you.  This is why I made sure to seat Boy9 on the end, so he could peer around this tall guy in front of him.

Can you see?

Back to my camera obsession:  The other day, Darling Husband was driving us around and we passed a horse farm.  I was thinking, “Gee, those horses would be nice to take pictures of,” when I noticed a woman standing on the side of the road taking pictures of the horses.  Darling Husband almost crashed the car when he heard the loud snapping noise that my head made as it whirled around almost 360 degrees to look at her camera.  The boys were afraid I’d been possessed.

I’ve got it bad.

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Oh! And can’t forget the whole point of the blog:  The Picture of the Day:

Die, Lego Mini-figs! Die!

This is Boy7’s science/history project.  Volcanos.  We made this volcano years ago, and every now and then we pull it back out and send hot death-lava raining down on the poor mini-figs who think they live on a benign mountain side.

They never even knew what hit them.