very simple

This is a little cheat-sheet I made when I was re-taking photo classes a few years ago. It’s how the various stops work on the camera. It’s helpful for a few reasons. First, my camera has 1/3 stops, so it’s good to remember which are the “real” stops and which are the parts of a stop. Second, it’s good for comparison’s sake. if you take a photo at a particular aperture and shutter speed, and then you move one full stop “up” for the aperture and one full stop “down” on the shutter speed, you’ll actually have the exact same light exposure (but things like depth of field will change). Film speed/ISO also works the same way (and is much more adjustable on a digital camera for obvious reasons). So if you’ve got your aperture wide open at 1.4, and your shutter really slow, and you’re still not getting enough light, you can increase the ISO. Or buy a good flash.

Our town in the Berkshires is one of the smallest and, as a consequence, our memorial day parade is quite small. There’s the veterans (including my dad), the village improvement society, the boy scouts and the 4H club. Plus lots of random townspeople. The 4H club is the only one that has its act together enough to have a float. Everyone’s welcome to march, but I feel I’m doing my part by actually watching the thing. Which lasts approximately 20 minutes, including speeches.

There’s not a lot of actual color in my parents’ garden yet, but things have started to bloom. Including the apple trees. We haven’t had apples in a few years because there seems to be an unpleasantly timed frost every year that kills everything off, but this year…no frost.

Baby apples:

bonus purple flower:

random photo holder on my desk, run through a lithograph filter.

Just another normal Saturday in New York City, when going to get a pedicure means randomly running into a latin dance parade. This is actually not the first year I’ve had this happen.

Hand-me-down necklace from my stepmom. One of my favorites.

Missed another couple of days – at this rate I’ll be really glad if I can get to at least 300 days of photos for the year.

Catching up through today…

I missed a few days over the last couple of weeks, with the renovation and the massive work project that finally came to fruition after months of work (months on my part, years on the part of others who have been there longer), so I’m finally taking a breath and catching up. Here’s what I managed to capture over the period, including the finished bathroom.

This was the first weekend that I’ve officially missed photos. My excuse is that between my brother coming home from Africa for a few days and my need to catch up on much sleep, I just forgot. Oh well.

In other news though, my brother is home for a few days. He’s transitioning from one job in Senegal to another in Afghanistan. If nothing else, he certainly knows how to keep us worried! But he’s going to be doing some really good educational development work over there with a major international organization actually based in the Middle East, so we’re rooting for him.

Pictures to return later. I’m hoping they’ve started on the floor today!

the remains of my fancy glassware. A few pieces have been casualties of my attempts at rearranging furniture. and Sadie. always Sadie.