drorzel | October 18, 2015Every Sunday, I take the kids down to the Schenectady Greenmarket, which from May-October is held outdoors, on the streets around City Hall. This puts it right next to our local independent bookstore, The Open Door, which is kind of popular with the kids:
SteelyKid and The Pip running into our local independent bookstore.
We have a standing agreement that they can each get one book every week, and SteelyKid can use her allowance to buy a toy if she chooses. We're amassing quite the collection of picture books, and The Pip will buy absolutely anything with superhero branding-- this week, he…
drorzel | October 17, 2015Another Saturday full of kid stuff, chiefly a rather brisk soccer game-- around 45F at game time, with a stiff breeze. It was interesting to see how different kids reacted to the cold. One or two got hyper, and ran around crazily to stay warm, while some others just disengaged from the game. And a couple had so many layers on that they appeared to be having difficulty running.
I was solo coaching today, so no action shots this week. I did, however, take a picture of these flowers by our front walk:
October flowers.
They're very pretty, as you can see, and you should admire them while you…
drorzel | October 16, 2015It was kind of an annoying week in a number of respects, which called for something frivolous and morale-bosting. Thus, this:
Dr. Brown is horrified to discover who's been funding Dr. Red's research on the Philosopher's Stone.
The shiny rocks are from a collection of "Gold and Diamonds" (i.e. pyrite and quartz) SteelyKid got at a local farm "mining" thing last weekend. The Legos are from the extensive collection in Chateau Steelypips.
That's about it for me. Have a great weekend.
drorzel | October 15, 2015In addition to a bunch of work-related stuff, I'm trying to devote some time during my sabbatical to fixing various problems that have piled up around Chateau Steelypips over the last few years when I was too busy to deal with much of anything. Thus, today's photo is this fairly unremarkable shot:
Jury-rigged extra shelves for the spice cabinet.
This exists mostly to document my recent reorganizing of a bunch of stuff in the kitchen. These cabinets above the stove are somewhat awkwardly located, and serve to hold spices and other cooking stuff. They're a little too deep to be ideal for…
drorzel | October 14, 2015One side effect of this photo-a-day business that I probably should've anticipated is that I spend a lot of time now looking at stuff and saying "That's make a good photo..." Which is annoying when I'm out and don't have the camera with me, so I've started throwing it in the car when I go out to run errands.
This paid off this morning, when I took The Pip to day care, and was greeted by this:
Rainbow over the entrance to the JCC this morning.
That's his day care sitting right at the end of a rainbow. Which is a lovely metaphor for either the value of having access to excellent pre-school,…
drorzel | October 13, 2015I'm helping coach SteelyKid's soccer practice tonight, but that's no problem for the photo-of-the-day blog, as I got that out of the way early:
Scene from this morning's walk with Emmy.
This is what it looks like when Emmy and I go for our morning stroll these days, a little after 6am. Which is sort of pretty, maybe, but it's a little depressing to realize it's not going to be substantially brighter than this until next March, give or take...
drorzel | October 13, 2015For the 42nd installment of this photo-a-day thing, it seems appropriate to try to do some SCIENCE! to get an Answer. So, here's a composite of a bunch of images I took yesterday in order to investigate something:
Graph paper shot with several different lenses, to look for distortion of the images.
OK, this needs some explanation...
So, I do a lot of shooting with moderately wide-angle lenses (either a 10-18mm zoom or the 24mm fixed "pancake" lens), because SteelyKid and The Pip tend to want to be right on top of me a lot of the time, and it's hard to get good pictures with them fully in…
drorzel | October 11, 2015'Tis the season when things get all colorful:
Colorful leaves on a tree in the front yard of Chateau Steelypips.
Not much to say other than that, really. This is the tree next to our driveway, shot with the 50mm f/1.8 lens. I spent a while shuffling around underneath the tree finding just the right angle-- getting the in-focus leaves against the sky and clear of the background ones-- but I'm pretty happy with how this came out.
drorzel | October 11, 2015Rhett is off at some sort of football game, but don't worry, I'll step up to make sure the Internet has pictures of kids playing soccer:
SteelyKid in action at rec soccer.
I'm assistant coaching the team (and the only coach for every other game), which makes it hard to get photos of SteelyKid, but I brought the camera to yesterday's game, and managed a few good shots. I try to avoid posting photos of other people's kids on the Internet, though, and this being second-grade soccer, it's not easy to get any photos near the ball where the frame isn't kind of crowded. So this cropped shot of…
drorzel | October 10, 2015Friday was yet another heavy kid-wrangling day, as the Pip had a minor surgical procedure in the early morning, which required general anaesthesia. This was done before 9am, but we had to keep him home from school for the day to watch for ill effects. Of which there were none, so he and I went out to the local science museum for a bit, to break up the cartoon-watching that was the other primary activity of the day.
I've posted a bunch of cute-kid photos already, though, so here's one that's just science museum stuff:
Smoke tornado at MiSci.
That's the artificial tornado exhibit-- a…
drorzel | October 9, 2015Another couple of weeks of science-y blogging at Forbes:
-- Football Physics: Deflategate Illustrates Key Concepts: In which I use the ever-popular silly scandal over deflated footballs as an excuse to talk about three-body recombination.
-- The Annoying Physics Of Air Resistance: Air resistance is an annoyance to be abstracted out in intro physics classes, but looking for its influence with video analysis is kind of fun.
-- How NASA's Viking Mars Probes Helped Prove Einstein Right: We think of missions to Mars as primarily about searching for life, but they have also helped test fundamental…
drorzel | October 8, 2015In yesterday's crude astrophotography post, I mentioned that the conjunction of Venus and the Moon would be closer this morning, but I took a shot of it yesterday because there's no telling with the weather here this time of year. When I first went outside this morning, though, the sky was beautiful and clear and I said "Wow, that'll be a great shot after all."
Then I went inside to eat breakfast, and when I came back out, clouds had rolled in.
There were occasional breaks, though, and I did manage to get a fortuitous alignment of two of those with the bodies in question. which let me make…
drorzel | October 7, 2015One of the few problems with the new camera is that the Canon software that talks to it only runs on my laptop, not my home desktop. This is an issue partly because the laptop has less disk space (I got it with the biggest SSD available a few years ago, which is small compared to the spinny-disk drives in the desktop), but a bigger issue for image processing is the display, which shifts colors dramatically as you change the viewing angle. This isn't a big issue for daylight photos of the kids, where the camera does pretty well already and the GIMP auto-level tool handles the few color issues…
drorzel | October 6, 2015The difficult-to-spell name "Schenectady" (where Union is located) derives from a Mohawk word meaning "beyond the pines." The pines in question are an extensive region of pine barrens between Albany and Schenectady, a small bit of which survives as the Albany Pine Bush Nature Preserve. They've got a nice little nature center and some trails through the pine bush, and I took The Pip down there this morning, because his day care was closed again for the last of the fall block of Jewish holidays. Here's a shot to give you an idea of the landscape:
Plants in the Pine Bush Nature Preserve.…
drorzel | October 5, 2015Another fall day, another holiday closing at the JCC. I was home with The Pip for most of the day, which was the usual mix of fun, exhausting, and puzzling. For example, while I offered several times to go out to a playground before lunch, he refused. But then insisted that we walk to the store to buy... something. I got this picture with my phone:
The Pip's bike in the rack at the Co-Op.
Because it amused me to see a bike rack with just a little red tricycle in it.
We did go to a couple of playgrounds later, and I shot some video that I'll use for physics-y stuff at some point. But this…
drorzel | October 5, 2015A big chunk of Sunday was lost to a wretched cold-- despite a two-hour afternoon nap, I was asleep by 10pm-- but I did get the camera out for a bit while doing some late-season grilling:
Pork chops on the grill.
Not the most amazing photo, I know (though it does take deliberate work to get those cross-hatched grill marks...), but it pairs well with this:
Thermal camera image of pork chops on the grill.
Which is the same basic scene in the infrared. Because I have a thermal camera, so why not?
drorzel | October 4, 2015Saturdays are the busiest days around Chateau Steelypips, with both SteelyKid and The Pip having soccer in the morning (in two different places), then lunch, then some sort of activity for the afternoon. Yesterday, this was a party for one of SteelyKid's friends. And last night, there was a Movie Night at SteelyKid's BFF's house, where the kids all watched a cartoon and the adults hung around reveling in adult conversation.
All of which means that I managed to go the entire day without taking any photos. Not even a cell-phone snapshot (I'm assistant coaching SteelyKid's soccer team, but the…
drorzel | October 2, 2015Took the camera along this afternoon when I took Emmy for a walk (Kate and I are going to see The Martian tonight, so Emmy got an early dinner and stroll), and took pictures of a bunch of random stuff in a little park near our house. Including these two pictures pasted together into one:
Two tree trunks in a park near Chateau Steelypips.
These two trees aren't right next to each other, but I didn't do much more than turn 90 degrees to get from one to the other. If I were attempting to pass myself off as an artiste, I would explain that this juxtaposition here is a political allegory: the…
drorzel | October 1, 2015It's October 1, aka "the day it starts being hard to keep track of what number photo we're on," and we're officially into Fall here in the Northeast US. Accordingly, it's a bit chilly (about 30F colder than a week ago), and while most of the leaves are still green, we're starting to see some changes:
The first fall colors from the maple tree out front.
That's the top of the maple tree next to our driveway, which is always one of the first trees in the neighborhood to turn colors and drop its leaves. (The giant oak in the back corner of our yard, on the other hand, will hold most of its…
drorzel | September 30, 2015It's rained fairly steadily for the last couple of days, which is to be expected. This also sent me to the back yard in hopes of getting a very particular effect for the photo of the day, that I had seen on a poster from the APS's student photo contest a few years ago:
Water drops on the canopy on our deck, with little inverted images of the back yard.
Here you see a large-aperture shot of drops of water hanging off the edge of the canopy over the patio table on our deck. The drops are in focus, but the rest of the yard is blurred out. If you look closely at the drops, though, you can see…