Pictures
drorzel | September 14, 2015Today was Rosh Hashanah-- happy new year to those who celebrate it-- meaning that both SteelyKid's school and The Pip's day care were closed. In an effort to maintain my sanity while keeping them entertained, I took them to the local science museum to rampage through hands-on exhibits. We also caught the planetarium show, because why not.
The show wasn't really pitched right for my 7- and 3.8-year-olds, but it did make me wonder how the new camera would do at photographing the sky. And it's pretty clear tonight, so here's a shot of the sky more or less straight up at about 9pm Eastern:
Stars…
drorzel | September 13, 2015Elite Northeastern private college tuition and fees (1989-1993): ~$80,000
Gold class ring from elite Northeastern private college: ~$500
Colorful Rainbow Loom bracelet from your seven-year-old daughter: Priceless.
My right hand.
SteelyKid made this bracelet the other day at her after-school day care, while demonstrating to her friends that she could knit the rubber bands together with her fingers. She "got a little carried away," and as a result it's too big for her. "But it fit one of the grown-ups, and I said 'Hey, I bet it would fit my dad!' So I want you to have it, Daddy."
So, I have…
drorzel | September 12, 2015SteelyKid spent a good chunk of the afternoon playing at a friend's house, so most of the photographic activity of the day involved The Pip energetically playing with various toys. This included a good while spent in the back yard with a Stomp Rocket:
The Pip attempts to send a Stomp Rocket into orbit.
In this shot, he's leaped with great force onto the rubber bulb of the launcher, sending the rocket up over his head. Kate is playing the Mission Control role.
This is cropped from a wider shot, part of a series of rapid-shutter images of the launch, zoomed out to get the whole flight. I…
drorzel | September 11, 2015Another crazy-busy day, with a really exhausting pick-up basketball game at lunchtime, but I did have a little time to try out two features of the new camera: the "Live" shooting mode, and the display screen on the back that flips out. These combine to allow you to take a really expensive selfie, if you want to do that sort of thing:
Yeah, it's still me.
Of course, this is kind of a silly use of an expensive DSLR camera. Also suboptimal, because the camera's pretty heavy, and it's hard to hold it steady in the necessary position. But it can<.em> be done...
And that's all I've got…
drorzel | September 10, 2015I said when I started this that there would inevitably be a few cell-phone snapshots, on days when I'm too busy to get fancy with the DSLR. This was one such, so here's a quick shot of SteelyKid at tonight's Elite Team taekwondo practice, talking to her coach.
SteelyKid, in sparring gear, with her taekwondo coach.
The Elite Team class is all sparring, all the time, and we established today that she's the youngest kid who goes to those classes. By about two months. Of course, the gap between second- and third-youngest is two years... (The second-youngest kid is the younger brother of one of…
drorzel | September 9, 2015Over at whatever, John Scalzi posts a lot of sunset photos. I don't get a lot of those, because for most of the year I need to be dealing with the kids-- wrangling them home from day care, making dinner, getting them to bed-- during the time when the sunset looks pretty. It's hard to appreciate the evening sky when SteelyKid and the Pip are squabbling over whose turn it is to pick what they watch on TV.
But I get a lot of opportunity at the other end of the day, since for a good chunk of the year it's still dark when I get up to walk Emmy. So today's photo of the day is an inverse Scalzi--…
drorzel | September 8, 2015I'm playing around with the various camera lenses I own, which include a rarely-used fixed 50mm focal length. This is "rarely used" because a good deal of what I use the camera for is taking pictures of the kids, and the separation needed to get them in frame with this lens is really difficult to maintain.
The cool thing about it is that it has a really large aperture, so you can get an extremely narrow depth of field, which makes for some cool focus effects. The lack of zoom capability is a bit of a challenge, in that if you want to frame a shot a particular way, you need to physically walk…
drorzel | September 7, 2015Having made a passing mention of the lake in my home town yesterday, it seems appropriate to post a photo of the lake itself. So, here you go.
Whitney Point Lake, from the dam.
It's been a very long, hot day, coming back to Chateau Steeypips from the weekend away, and then taking the kids to the last day of the outdoor pool at the JCC for this year. So that's pretty much all you get.
drorzel | September 6, 2015Today's photo-of-the-day is of the point that gives my home town of Whitney Point its name- the Tioughnioga (left) and Otselic (right) rivers come together here, providing as good a reason as any to locate a town here back in the late 1700's. This was originally named "Patterson's Point"; Whitney was an innkeeper who ran a mail drop, and people inevitably got sick of addressing things to "Whitney's Inn at Patterson's Point," so the name got condensed.
There's a dam on the Otselic now (for values of "now" dating back to before WWII-- it was started as a New Deal labor project), and my parents…
drorzel | September 5, 2015Today was a busy day-- the kids played around my parents' house for a while, then we went to the Field Days in Johnson City to ride carnival rides for a bit. I have some decent pictures and a bit of video from all that. For the official photo-a-day picture, though, we'll go with something kind of random, namely the weather station my dad has in the bac yard.
The weather station my father has in the back yard.
Why? I dunno. I find the shape kind of interesting, and I liked the way the drops of dew on it caught the light. And, you know, this sort of exercise is about finding interesting…
drorzel | September 4, 2015It's Labor Day weekend here in the US, so we've come down to my parents' for an end-of-summer weekend. The kids are, of course, thrilled to be visiting Grandma and Grandpa's house where they can bask in the warmth of... Transformers cartoons on Grandma and Grandpa's Netflix subscription.
(I'd say "Kids these days," but if I'm totally honest, I would have to admit that getting to watch WPIX was a highlight of visits to my grandmother on Long Island back when I was their age...)
Anyway, a lot of the pictures I end up taking look basically like this: quick snapshots of the kids doing whatever.…
drorzel | September 3, 2015Last weekend, while the kids were at my parents', Kate and I decided to go over to Williamstown and look at some art. We originally intended to go to the Clark Art Institute, but it was mobbed, so we drove on to MassMoCA instead.
I told several different people about that, all of whom said "Oh, did you go to the Van Gogh show?" Which made me want to see the Van Gogh show, and since I'm on sabbatical and not teaching, I drove over there and actually went to the Clark this time. (Which was still mobbed, but I got there early enough to get in...)
The Van Gogh exhibit was, in fact, very…
drorzel | September 2, 2015I spent a while this morning typing on my laptop on the deck, and brought the new camera out with me for occasional procrastination. The shady spot at that hour has a nice view of the bird feeder, and I snapped a few shots of these guys feeding (using a telephoto lens):
Two birds on our backyard feeder; not sure of the species.
(I cropped and scaled this, and did the auto-level color correction in GIMP.)
The one on the left is a house sparrow, I believe, and we have dozens of them around. I don't think I've ever seen the one on the right before, though, and have no idea what species it is…
drorzel | September 1, 2015Today, I officially stopped being department chair, and started my sabbatical leave. I also acquired a new toy:
My new camera, taken with the old camera.
My old DSLR camera, a Canon Rebel XSi that I got mumble years ago, has been very good for over 20,000 pictures, but a few things about it were getting kind of flaky-- it's been bad at reading light levels for a while now, meaning I'm constantly having to monkey with the ISO setting manually, then forgetting to change it back when I move to a brighter location and taking a bunch of pictures where everything is all blown out. It also…
drorzel | August 28, 2015SteelyKid starts second grade next week, and her summer project was to read Julius, the Baby of the World and make a poster with baby pictures of herself. This, of course, led to looking at a lot of old photos of SteelyKid, including many of the Baby Blogging shots I took back in the day with Appa for scale.
And now, of course, both kids are way bigger than Appa, so they wanted some up-to-date scale photos. Which, of course, I had to share with the Internet. So, behold, the attack of the giant children:
SteelyKid and the Pip are HUGE!
Standing photo so you can see Appa for proper scaling…
drorzel | January 26, 2015Tonight's bedtime stories included two books involving flying characters: Foo, the Flying Frog of Washtub Pond (in which the title character gets blown into the sky by a gust of wind), and The Magic Brush. The latter is a dead-grandparent book, but ends with a cheerful picture of the kids reunited with their grandfather in their imagination, riding a flying horse. The Pip didn't pick up on the death bit, luckily for me.
"Look at them, Daddy, they're flying!"
"Yep. They're on a flying horse."
"But why are they flying?"
"Why? Well, because flying would be a lot of fun."
"I wish I could fly."
"…
drorzel | January 22, 2015One of my favorite Christmas presents this year was a Seek Thermal camera to use with my Android phone. This allows for a lot of idle physics-y fun, taking pictures of things in thermal mode.
One idea I had was to do a sort of follow-up to the test of my insulated mug that I did a couple of years ago with a PASCO thermocouple probe. That showed a really dramatic difference between my metal IQC water bottle and the insulated mug, in terms of the rate at which hot water placed in each cooled. So, how do these look in thermal imaging?
Well, I took my insulated mug (actually a different one than…
drorzel | December 25, 2014Once again, it's Christmas for those who celebrate it, and a really boring Thursday on the Internet for those who don't. In keeping with tradition, we've taken the kids to Grandma and Grandpa's house in Scenic Whitney Point, NY for a few days.
This will coincide with a big drop-off in social media use on my part, for a number of reasons; I've got one more post scheduled for the day after tomorrow, and that's probably it for 2014 blogging. I'll be ringing in the New Year in Charleston, SC at the Renaissance Weekend event there, and while that promises to be a good deal of fun, they've got very…
drorzel | November 16, 2014I've been quieter than usual here, partly because I've been crushingly busy, but primarily because most of the things I want to talk about, I can't. Not yet, anyway. But I'm still alive, and this murderous term will be over soon, at which point blogging will pick up a bit.
I will throw in a quick teaser for something coming up in the future, though, by way of a thank-you to the folks at Schaffer Library who let me take some photos of the rare books collection:
An 1845 edition of "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation," published anonymously but now known to be the work od Robert…
drorzel | November 7, 2014Exactly three years ago today, The Pip arrived, in a manner that will allow him to kill Macbeth should that become necessary. This is the age where kids first become aware of the concept of birthdays, so he's just a tiny bit excited about this.
He's a fast-developing Little Dude, chattering more and more every day. And using big words-- in the car the other morning, I pointed out that he could fit his whole hand in the pockets of the pants he was wearing, which he proceeded to do. "I want to show Mommy this, when we get home," he said. "Meanwhile, I can do it by myself!" He's getting into…