Karma

A few years back I took the picture below when I was in San Francisco. The poor tourist was just trying to look a little darker for her vacation. I had a good laugh over her fool hardy ways. I even pointed (behind her back) and laughed with my sisters and took a picture that I have often looked back at and giggled about.

This is what happens when you point at laugh at someone's spray tan and then think the same thing won't happen to you.

Now Jeff understands why I was so self conscious over my weird blotchy feet all week. In the end I decided the cute toenails would maybe distract from the overall ickiness of the spray tan.

Note to self: Just because something costs more doesn't guarantee better results.

Mother's Day Highlights

This wasn't the best part of my Mother's Day by any stretch of the imagination... it was just one of the highlights.

While driving to church we noticed it, a toilet in the middle of a dirt/gravel lot. It wasn't just any toilet though. This throne had a brown bowl and a pink tank with a palm tree. Because when I see a palm tree painted on a toilet, well, it just makes me think of tropical vacations and exotic getaways to faraway lands.

**If you are in the Modesto area and looking for a beauty such as this, don't hesitate to swing on over to the corner of Encina and ElVista to pick this bad boy up, pretty sure you can take the five finger discount and no one will miss it (except me next week while driving to church).

Little by Little

In my last post I mentioned my new camera lens and Robin asked about my other lenses. I only have one other lens and it is the kit lens (18-55mm) that came with my now somewhat out of date Canon Digital Rebel. When we bought our SLR I knew nothing about photography except that it was annoying when using a digital camera that had a delay in taking the picture. So I tried to find a camera with the shortest delay possible. In reading on a few websites and Consumer Reports a lot of people said to truly get no delay you had to have an SLR. I also figured we could afford it while I was still working and I would never be able to justify it once I was not gainfully employed (because I still work--like, A LOT!).

So the point of all that is basically that I bought way more camera than I knew what to do with. In time I thought I would figure it out and then maybe I could stop using that little green square that was the auto setting. And in trying to learn there is a lot to tackle and if you try to do it all at once it will make your head spin. So I read somewhere that shooting in RAW file format is what the pros do. So I decided I wanted to be cool like them so I should shoot RAW too. The thing is RAW files are about 5x the size of regular jpegs. But if you are still reading this boring post you probably already know that. The thing is though, it was an easy thing I could do to give me some cred.

The problem is, I didn't know what the point of all those huge files was. I knew I could change stuff about the pictures, but I was confused because I was still saving the images as jpegs too and the jpegs always looked a bit better than the RAW versions, so why would I waste all that extra space for poor pics.

Now I am figuring things out. Not everything, just a few things. This is a pic I shot a couple weeks back. Pretty bad, way over exposed, and I think it looks a little on the cool side. But with a few clicks, it gets better.

Here's the jpeg.

Here's the RAW version (and I realize now this is probably a bad example because the RAW version actually looks better than the jpeg in this case).

First, I warmed it up a bit by changing the white balance to flash.

Then the real magic happened when I hit the auto button to fix the exposure/recovery.

For the final touch, I cropped it a bit (I could have cropped a regular jpeg too).

It isn't perfect by any means, but it is way better, and I am starting to understand, just a little bit why shooting in RAW is cool.

**I haven't had a chance to play with the sharpening yet, but I owe the little bit I know about RAW to Digital Photography for Moms. This looks like a great blog that can give me (and you) lots of great tips.

Me

I was scrolling through the Picasa pics and Callie looked up at the computer and said, "Me!"

So I had to post it!

A Buzz

 

 

 

The lemon tree is in bloom right now and when I go out into the backyard I can hear it buzzing from several feet away with all the bees doing all their pollination.

I have also been playing around with my new 50mm F1.8 lens and I have taken a huge pile of bad pics. With some cropping I thought these were kind of cool.

The Ghost

 

I have recently started playing around with some of the manual settings on my camera, but I don't always check to see how things are turning out, so I end up with a lot of pics to delete. Anyway, today when I uploaded pictures I found this one of Alyson. This is the straight out of camera shot. Kind of eery.

Where Credit Is Due

Today I was blog surfing and ran across a recipe that looked very familiar. I remembered where I saw it before and compared the two. They were almost exactly the same. I first saw this recipe on Good Eats on Food Network and today it was on a random girl's blog. Maybe it is a common enough recipe, but when I did a google search for it, there were several recipes out there (in the first 30 finds) and the only ones that were close to Alton's gave him credit.

I don't know why this is troubling me so much. Did random blogger chick mean to plagiarize his recipe? Did she really plagiarize it, because she did change three sentences (everything else is copy and pasted)? How much do you have to change for it to not be plagerized?

I also find myself annoyed with the person who linked to her. I know the linker probably had no clue that this girl is a dirty rotten thief, but it is her fault I am mad at random chick. I am also mad at the post because I would like to leave a comment noting her plagiarism but she doesn't have comments open.

So wise internets, do I call her out and email her to see if she fixes it. Do I look at other recipes, find out where she stole them from (a few have sources noted, but some do not) and then call her out on all her recipes, when I find where she stole them from? Or am I getting myself all worked up for no good reason? (I know in the grand scheme of things it isn't really important, I am just mad. But seriously, should I email her and call her out? I don't know her, so is it presumptuous of me to even suggest that she is a no good, dirty rotten, pig thief?)

Updated Again: I am going to take down the links and email her, to see what happens. If nothing happens, it is okay because Jamie is right, the world will go on.

Updated Yet Again: She did go back and add that the recipe was originally by Alton Brown at Food Network. So I basically got upset for nothing.

For Real This Time

We had a good run at breastfeeding. Callie will be 16 months old tomorrow and we are officially done nursing. I know I threatened being done about a month ago, but this time I mean it.

This is a picture of my delicious baby when she was just 5 days old. Mmm, I love that drunken passed out look. I also love that she had a milk mustache. I had talked to the lactation consultant earlier that day and she asked if my milk had come in, she was concerned because we used a nipple shield. After our conversation, I worried I wouldn't have enough milk, but looking back at this picture it seems like she was doing okay, and I worried for no good reason.

You can't tell from this picture but she was still on the bilirubin blanket at this time and we were nursing every 2 hours. I remember thinking at 4 in the morning that day I was going to be spending hours and hours and hours in that chair, with the boppy, for what felt like forever. Now I can't believe how quickly the last 16 months have passed.

Rock The Vote

We once again pause our regularly scheduled blog (because you know around these parts, whenever I get around to it, is considered regularly scheduled) to tell you to vote for one of my friends in the Rachael Ray March Menu Mania contest being held by UsaToday.

Carla's recipe is for Italian Chicken Sliders and is in the final four. If she makes it through this round, she will get to go to New York for a feature on the Rachael Ray show and she will have a chance of winning $5000 worth of groceries!

Hurry up and vote, you only have until March 27.

*Sidenote: I have not had a chance to try her recipe yet, but I have heard from her cousin that it is awesome, and besides she is up against chili and that isn't very original.

**Elections are really just a popularity contest and she was "like, totally popular" when we were in high school. So you should go vote for her because she is cool and if you vote for her you will be cool too.

***That last part was actually kind of a lie, she was only cool because she was a senior when I was a freshman and she was "like, totally cool," by a band/colorguard definition.

UPDATE: She didn't win. Darn. She was disappointed (especially because she found out on her birthday), but I think she will use this as a jumping off point to do something else food related.

Self Portraits

In looking at the millions of pictures amassed since Callie's birth there are approximately 42 that include me. Most of those include a nursing baby and/or me asleep with my hair in a state of disarray that was not even possible before I had a child (thus giving up daily brushing).

Back before the days of the digital camera the self portraits were the ones I took at the end of the roll just so I could get it developed, and they were usually placed in the trashcan upon viewing. But in today's world of the digital trash can (which is so much more convenient, not to mention cheaper) I can click to my hearts content and occasionally one might turn out that is cute enough to share with the world.

Do you have any self photos that you love, or any tips I might use for improving my own?