Quality time.

Friday, Chris & went to Golden Gardens beach.

The ship & sailboat shot above was taken especially for Vera.

While I was thus occupied, Chris sorted rocks. It seemed to be quality time.

We like the beach.

The pond turtles seem to know how to enjoy quality time.

As do kids, when there is a creek to be dammed.

Vera likes lighthouses, so this is another picture for her. Pretty short lighthouse - she'll probably be disappointed.

Archie got a little quality time too (I am also obligated to post frequent cat pictures).

Beachness & such

I wandered out to Richmond Beach today for a little block play, train watching, and general beachness & photography play.
The image above is a grayscale conversion of a normal color image.

The image below was made in infrared.
For more on infrared, see today's Blockplay post.

A thousand and one ...

I've now taken over a thousand pictures with my new camera, since getting it May 21st.

This ship, taken from the pedestrian overpass at Richmond Beach Saltwater Park, is #1001.

The last picture of the morning was #1048, one of a bracketed triplet of this crow, which is #1046 - and actually the next to the last.

The camera takes bracketed triplets in the order middle-bright-dark but numbers them dark-middle-bright. The taking order makes sense, since the middle shot is most likely to be "right," and you may only hold the button down for one shot, not three. But it can make viewing the images in numerical order funny, with a moving subject (e.g. a train) jumping back then leaping ahead.

My thousand images include accidental button pushes, making images just to see how a
function worked, pictures of my toenails, and lots of semi-duplicates
because I held the button down in continuous-shooting mode, or bracketed shots.

But hey, that's an important part of getting to know a new camera with lots of options, and should continue even after I have 'learned everything' as I need to relearn what I have forgotten, and stretch the boundaries of what I thought I knew.

A couple more images are here.

Alpenrose

One of my favorite things about sunny mornings is how a spot of sunlight reflecting off some car windshield out on the street will be turned into ripples of light by the old glass in our front window.

I've often contemplated making a portrait of someone illuminated by this light, but the logistics are daunting - the illumination is brief and high up on the wall.

The other morning I grabbed an Alpenrose milk bottle - echoing the theme of "old glass" - and held it in a patch of the rippled light for some one handed trial shots.

Alpenrose was the dairy that delivered milk, in brown bottles similar to this one, to a box on our porch in Portland in the 1950s. It was also the dairy that we went to on field trips from Ockley Green Elementary School, as did school kids from all over Portland.

One option would be sandwiching two images, one a the light pattern such as this one, another of the subject. It wouldn't be hard to do in image editing software, but that doesn't appeal to me much.

And for Archie fans, here he is in a moment of liesure.