Directions FAIL

This is what it’s supposed to say:

1/2 mile south OF CHIPPENHAM at Turner Road

(I looked it up on the map just to be sure)

Imaginary scenario:

The Guy at the Gold Exchange calls up his brother-in-law in some faraway place who fancies himself the master of all things digital and asks him for help making his commercial. Sure, says the brother-in-law. What do you want it to say? The Guy tells him and the brother-in-law writes it all down. The Guy sends the brother-in-law low resolution photos and he makes the commercial in Windows Movie Maker and sends it to HGTV. Keep in mind that the brother-in-law has never been here and he made the commercial just like he heard it over the phone with a bad connection. Because the brother-in-law is so good at what he does, The Guy doesn’t question that his brother-in-law didn’t ask him to proofread it first.

And for those of you who don’t live in Richmond, yes, it’s Hull Street Road. It’s common around here for streets to be named like this.

Make it stop!

Of course I’m talking about snow. It’s no longer a novelty, it’s a royal pain. I can see why my parents moved to Los Angeles way back when, LOL. My dad, anyway. He’s a Wisconsin native. My mom’s from Arkansas, which does get snow, but probably not like what my dad was used to.

So what do you do when you’re snowed in on yet another weekend? Make a batch of peanut butter cookies, of course! Yum-o!

Since the snow wasn’t showing signs of letting up, I decided to take my camera out into the backyard to see if there was anything new to shoot. Joey went out with me and decided he really does like snow after all. We had to quarantine him to the kitchen so that these funny-looking cotton ball-like balls of snow would melt there rather than all over the rest of the house.

I really like this one. I wonder if it’s worthy of being printed:

If I was any good at retouching, I’d clone out the shepherd’s hook for a nicer composition. I might just try it to see what I can do with it.

Lard!

What in the heck is “Lard?” This time I’m picking on channel 8. Oh Richmond, your local news channels are so lacking.

Batik swap

I signed up to participate in a Batik swap over at the quilting forum on about.com. This is a monthly swap and the first month’s theme is “Anything.”

These are the fabrics I chose:

I’m to cut each yard into 4 fat quarters, keep 1 for myself and send the other 3 to the swap hostess. In turn, she will send me 6 FQs.

But I have a problem. The lighter fabric is terribly off grain. It’s off by 3 inches on one end. If I’m lucky, I’ll get 2 FQs out of it. I can keep the smallest cut for myself but I’m afraid I’m going to have to buy more. There’s no way that I’m going to send fabric that doesn’t absolutely adhere to the rules of the swap. Heaven forbid I should become a swapper not in good standing the first time I try one with this group.

Well, I guess this is a learning experience. Next month, I’ll have the lady at the quilt shop tear the fabric rather than cut it. Will they do that? I hope so. It’s not their fault the fabric is on the bolt that way, but I would hope they’d help me out.

Snow scenes

Are you tired of snow talk yet? My mother wants to see pictures, so I’ll post them here and my brother can show them to her on his laptop.

Snowy weekend

We were hit with another snowstorm this past weekend, what’s up with that? That’s the 3rd major snowfall in less than a year. This is Virginia, not Wisconsin. We were forecast to get from 6-12″ with the south side of the river getting hit the hardest. Turns out we got 13″ and in some cases, that was more than what Chesterfield got.

It started snowing Friday night in the wee hours and when I got up about 6am, we’d only gotten about an inch, if even that. So I figured we were probably on track to get the low side of the forecast. But it snowed all day long most times pretty heavy. We stayed in, because I presume just about everything was closed, plus the roads hadn’t been plowed. We don’t have 4WD.

Yesterday was Shovel the Driveway Again Day. When we had the last storm, we had 1 official snow shovel and 1 flat bladed garden spade. While that was better than nothing, it didn’t help reduce the amount of time it took to clear our driveway (John estimates it’s about 180ft long). So when I was off between Christmas and New Year’s, I bought another Official Snow Shovel at Lowe’s not thinking I’d get to use it this soon. I can’t say we made quick work of it, it still took hours, but it had to be better than before.

While we were out front, our neighbor dog, Cranky, came over to visit. His dad was shoveling their driveway so he got to be out and about.

Since Cranky was out, John decided to let Joey out. Joey does NOT like the snow. But he had a blast running back and forth in the tire tracks we cleared like a crazy man.

And they played together.

What do you do when you’re snowed in?

There’s all kinds of things I could be doing and seeing as how it’s snowed steadily ALL DAY LONG and it’s now 4:45, I figure we won’t be going to church tomorrow so whatever I didn’t do today I can do tomorrow (after I help shovel the driveway, of course).

I have fabric to cut up for a batik swap I’m in over on about.com. I have fabric for two gift projects to wash, dry, iron. I have a book I can start. I’ve been waiting for the snow to stop so that I can take the camera out. I’ve been taking pictures through the windows, but that is limiting.

So in the meantime, I thought I would post pictures of one of my favorite pasttimes: documenting typos on Channel 12 news.

For crying out loud Channel 12, why are you hiring people who can’t spell/type to do your on-screen titles? And why isn’t there someone else on your payroll who can do the QC on them before they go live?

Trying to emulate Trey Ratcliff

I’m a fan of Stuck in Customs, Trey Ratcliff’s amazing HDR photos. There are those who decry what he does as “not realistic,” etc. but I see his work as artistic, creative and the colors are amazing. Wait, I already said amazing.

I lugged my tripod around Rockwood Park because if there was an opportunity to get an HDR shot, I didn’t want to miss it. If you don’t know what HDR is, it stands for High Dynamic Range. You can Google around to get more detailed info on the concept. When I got to the pond, I didn’t really see anything artistic about it, but there was this wooden dock across the way that looked like the most promising thing around. So I set up the tripod, plugged in my new remote shutter release cable to avoid shake at all costs (the only thing I didn’t set was mirror lockup, a feature new to me on the 40D) and took 5 identical shots. Identical except for the exposures. I used exposure compensation set at -2, -1, 0, +1, +2. Basically I got 2 underexposed shots, 1 fairly correct and 2 overexposed shots.

I brought all 5 into Photoshop CS3, and used the “merge to HDR” function which opens a new document and loads each of the photos onto a different layer in it. I don’t know enough about it yet to know if there’s anything more to it than that. I expect there is, because you can load multiple pictures into layers manually, whether they’re for HDR or not. But that’s as far as I took it, not knowing what else to do.

I then ran Topaz Adjust on it and this is my result, not in Trey Ratcliff’s territory but interesting:

[Edited to add] This is not displaying as vibrant as I see it on my computer, let me see if I can figure out what the problem is this time. Every time I think I’ve got this figured out, something changes.

I’ll have to play with it some more to see if I can get it anywhere near what Trey is able to accomplish. Of course, his procedure may be way complicated or it could be as easy as adding a couple of filters in Photoshop, you just can’t tell by looking at it.

Rockwood Park, Chesterfield County

This past Saturday, the Richmond Photography Meetup group met at Rockwood Park on Hull Street (Hwy 360) in Chesterfield County. I had not been there before and was anxious for a new opportunity to make some more “Wordless Wednesday” images since I’ve run out.

There were about 20 of us; some, like me, with tripods, one or two with a monopod, one guy wearing two camera bodies around his neck. Yes we certainly looked professional and we got more than one curious look from the people enjoying a relatively nice day at the park (it was in the low 50s which was quite a warm-up from the weekend before). One lady, new to the group, brought her sheltie and I wonder if she regretted that decision. I know I can’t bring Joey on a photowalk, I’d never get any pictures taken.

This is a nice park with about 5 miles of walking trails, a big lake (or pond as it’s called on the map), baseball diamonds, an arboretum, a nature center and a dog park. We took the “orange” trail, which starts near the dog park, winds along the pond and ends at the nature center. Marlene, the organizer of the event, admitted that she wasn’t sure there would be many opportunities for good shots, considering the time of year, but we did it anyway. I think most of us agreed that we should come back in the spring and/or fall when there will be more color.

Photowalking at the lake

The weekend before last, I had to be up and out early on Saturday to get the dog to the groomer so I decided to take my camera and tripod down to our neighborhood lake. We had had a light dusting of snow a few days before and while I wish I could have done this before going to work when it was fresh, there was still enough sitting on the frozen lake that I thought I might get some good shots.