It was another fantastic day out today (high 70s), so after lunch we took the kids and headed over to one of the local parks. Quinn was riding his scooter and Catherine was riding Quinn's tricycle. Getting to the park took some time. It's not quite a mile away, maybe 2/3 to 3/4 of a mile though. Once we were at the park the kids played around on the monkey bars and the slides. I did some stunts and Quinn called me (and I quote) "a real life monkey". I think we had been there for maybe 5 to 6 minutes when as Catherine was walking across the balance beam, she got real still, and knelt down on the beam, and peed. Wonderful. This was one of her first real accidents in a long time. She's been really good lately (even making it through the night for the past month or so). We didn't have a change of clothes with us, so I volunteered to go back and get the car (which does have a change of clothes in it). I made the mistake of running back. Two things were wrong with this plan. Problem 1) I'm out of shape and as I said, it was over half a mile away so I got winded pretty quick. I ran almost halfway, slowed to a walk for a minute or two and then ran the rest of the way. Problem 2) I'm still not completely recovered from being sick. Once I did get back to the house, I was coughing so bad I thought I was going to hurl.
I hopped in the car and drove over to the park to see Catherine running around sans underwear and pants, but with Ginger's shirt wrapped around her waist and the arms tied like a belt (guess it's a good thing Ginger wore layers today). After Catherine got changed, the kids played around for a bit while I recovered. It wasn't too long before they decided they were ready to head home (according to Ginger the fun is getting to the park, not actually playing at the park). Once home the kids snacked and went to take their naps. While they napped I watched about 2/3 of the season finale of Battlestar Galactica.
Before I could finish watching, Quinn woke up and we went outside and played (the usual, scooter, tee ball, etc). In the picture, see if you can find Quinn's batting problem. Ignore that the shots are fuzzy / out of focus, that was because it was getting darker and due to the lens I was using (more on that later). They say you have to keep your eye on the ball. He would probably have a better chance of doing that if he kept his eyes open (and no, I wasn't using a flash for the shots). Once we migrated to the backyard, I fired up the grill while Quinn played and started cooking some hamburgers. Luckily around this time Ginger woke up and watched Quinn (he had migrated back to the front yard) so I could continue cooking. Catherine got up about this same time and went out to play also.
Today when we went outside I took my camera again, but this time I swapped out the 'made for the digital camera lens' with one of my older SLR lenses. This was an old 70mm to 200mm lens, and I believe the digital camera introduces a 1.5 zoom factor to non digital lenses which means this lens is effectively 105mm to 300mm. I tried a different couple of shots of stuff, just to see what it could do. It's not an official Nikon lens. It's from back in my cheap days (okay, my 'even cheaper' days) so it's a Sigma lens. It's not too bad. It took this shot of Quinn fairly well. It actually does pretty 
good provided you have lots and lots of light available to take the shot. I took a shot of the moon and that didn't come out as crisp as I would have liked (it was during the day, and it was overcast / hazy, so maybe that was part of the problem). I still would have liked to have seen more distinct features instead of 
the fuzziness I ended up getting. Maybe it wasn't focusing correctly. I'll probably try this experiment again sometime. The bird shot was me sitting on my front porch shooting a bird in a neighbor's yard across and up the street, so it's a fair distance away.After the kids were in bed, I watched the end of Battlestar Galactica. SciFi channel apparently doesn't understand the concept of telling time though since the show ran past the time it was suppose to end and Tivo didn't get all of it. I assume the greedy executives at the SciFi decided to pack extra commercials in the season finales of their shows all night pushing the end time of shows later and later throughout the night. Really quite annoying. Guess I'll see if the show is going to be rerun anytime soon and if not I'll have to try and grab it through a torrent.
1 comment:
One of the coolest pictures I ever saw was a picture of the Canadian Rockies, taken by a friend of mine in my old telecom days. The sky was incredibly blue, the grass brilliant green, the crispness of the mountains was amazing. This was in the early ninties, before digital and photoshop. I asked her how she did it... she said it was a standard 35mm film camera, no zoom or detachable lenses... she had simply removed her polarizing sunglasses and placed them over the lens of the camera. Kind of cool from a McGyver perspective.
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