Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/5.6, ISO 3600 — full exif
Cake Arrives
six candles: confirmed!
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/2.8, ISO 1400 — full exif
Basking in the Song
“Happy Birthday to You”, of course
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/4, ISO 1250 — full exif
(Maybe I Spoke Too Soon)
must talk to him, again, about safe knife-handling procedures...
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — 1/125 sec, f/4, ISO 1800 — full exif
used to be his
Name Written in Chocolate
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/125 sec, f/3.2, ISO 1000 — full exif
Washing It All Down
with cold, tasty milk
Looking in my photo archives, I see we've done this type of thing a few times before. We did it last year, and the year before as well. It's almost as if we do this every year. 🙂
I'm not all that happy with the photos... the lighting was horrible (mixed incandescent and fluorescent) which makes for a white-balance nightmare, and for the dark, candle-lit shots.... I dunno.... I just expected more from a D700 that can take pictures in the dark. One of the problems was nailing focus... the lack of a good focus screen on the D700 is maddening.
And when I had the autofocus Nikkor 24-70/2.8 on there during the brighter times, it still had a lot of issues in letting the shutter release after focusing. It focused just dandy, but it didn't think it did, and so held the shutter back. Maddening. I eventually switched to manual focus, but then we go back to the first problem.
Then there are problems that I brought on myself by not paying attention to what was going on. Every single shot of him and the cake shows what looks like only five candles. I just got really really unlucky with the candle alignment WRT my position. Sigh. Because I wanted the first photo on his “turns six years old” post to show six candles, I went ahead and “enhanced” that first photo by adding an extra candle and two extra flames. (All in Lightroom, no less.) Had I not done it, it would have appeared at first glance to have only four candles. As it is now, upon very close inspection, you'll see seven candles.
Then to add insult to injury, there's apparently a bug in the color-management support in Firefox 3 that, when color-management is enabled, causes the darkest parts of the candle-lit photos to be rendered in a horrible pixelated, striped way that I'm at a loss to explain. Firefox on the Mac works fine, as does Firefox on Windows if I turn off color management. Sigh.
Luckily, Anthony doesn't care about these photo woes. He got toys.
This evening, I've been testing some new code in my Lightroom export plugin for SmugMug that deals with replacing images already uploaded to SmugMug. In order to be able to quickly see whether a new image has replaced an old one, I would first go into Lightroom's develop module and slam some random slider to its hilt, making a wildly different result that, once uploaded, I could easily ascertain was different from the old one.
After things were working and I pushed out the new version of the plugin, I paused to actually look at the image my random testing had left me with, and I was struck by how pretty it was. When I started the testing, I happened to have on my screen the butterfly image from this evening's post, so that's what I used, and the image above is what I was left with.
It looks less dazzling when viewed on my consumer-level Dell monitor, but in Lightroom, on my higher-end Eizo monitor, it's pretty amazingly vibrant.
I've posted before about interesting/funky/amazing effects you can achieve with the develop controls in Lightroom (see some of the links in the “Related posts” box below), but this one was quite serendipitous.
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 — 1/200 sec, f/3.5, ISO 2800 — full exif
PuriPuri-chan, Today
( a Swallowtail Butterfly )
Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 + extension tubes — 1/100 sec, f/5.6, ISO 4000 — full exif
PuriPuri-chan, Three Weeks Ago
A month or so ago, Arthur gave us a black, blob-like, ugly little caterpillar perhaps half an inch long, and told us how to take care of it. It didn't move for the first two days, so when Arthur told me that it was just preparing for the “next stage”, I figure that would be “decomposition”.
But it eventually started eating the orange leaves we put in (kindly provided by Arthur), and went in cyclic fits of eating, rest, and the occasional little caterpillar poopy. Anthony named her “プリプリちゃん”, (puripuri-chan) which, as far as Anthony is concerned, translates to something along the lines of “Little Wiggle-Butt.”
After a week or so, she suddenly changed into the much-more-attractive green thing shown in the picture above, which I took with a 50mm f/1.2 lens attached to some extension tubes. It was much easier than using a reversed lens for macro work, but the quality I ended up with is still pretty bad. I didn't put much effort, but still, I'd have had better quality with less effort had I just used a real macro lens. Must get one.
Anyway, after a while, she climbed upside-down onto a branch, hung on with her bottom feet while suspending the top of her body with two thin threads, and turned herself into a chrysalis. Her outer body just morphed into a cocoon-like casing, in which she sat for almost two weeks.
This morning at 9am she was still in there, but when I looked again an hour and a half later, she was out and stretching her wings.
Anthony let her our when he got home from school. She jumped on his shirt for a few moments, then flew over to a tree.
If I ever do get a decent macro lens, I'll try to get another puripuri-chan and take a time-lapse of her life....
Sigh, I just realized that the iPhone photo viewer does not even allow you to save/display high-resolution versions of photos you want to bring with you. That's fine for “pretty pictures” that you don't need to see detail on to appreciate (e.g. like those from my fall-foliage photo stream), but that makes the iPhone worthless for showing most daily snapshots, such as those from Anthony's kindergarten sports festival. The first thing a parent wants to do is zoom up to see the kid's smile, and on the iPhone all you see is the 640 × 480 image blown up with heavy pixilization.
Worthless.
Sigh.