I had another chance to practice with my new camera at today's swim meet. I took some video of Annabelle's 50-yard freestyle:
(Hey, speaking of Annabelle, guess who else is participating in Blog365? Go over there right now and show Annabelle the love!)
I didn't get another chance to take pictures of her, so I practiced on other people's kids instead. Nothing to write home about. Out of 63 photos, I got 2 that were semi-decent or at least interesting. Here is "semi-decent," a somewhat blurry shot of some kid from Trinity (click to see it bigger):
And here is "interesting," one of our guys (again, clicking makes the photo grow):
Damn, I really wish that one had been centered, thus elevating it to semi-decent status!
Of course, they both get even more interesting if I solarize them. Check it out!
Did I mention that Fred gave me a new camera for Christmas? It's a beauty, the Panasonic DMC-TZ3. I took it to today's swim meet in Bowling Green and faced the learning curve. After being a Sony girl for over 3 years, it's going to take me a while to get used to some things, but I think in the long run, it's going to be perfect. Today though was not so perfect.
I started off by using the video feature to record Annabelle's 50-yard freestyle. Somehow though, as soon as I started recording I also pushed to stop recording. Therefore, at the end of the race when I pushed again, thinking I was stopping it, I was actually starting it, just in time to capture 12 breathtaking seconds of footage of ceiling, feet, and empty pool as I wandered back to the bleachers.
For her next race, a freestyle relay, I decided to experiment with the burst mode and shoot some stills. I took this picture, which I was quite please with (I'm not down-sizing any of the images in this post, so feel free to click and see the full-size version):
I admired it on my way back to the stands, where I found Fred cheering wildly for some girl in the pool. Who, I inquired, was that? Oh, just Annabelle. Yes, I had taken pictures of the WRONG KID! Everybody around Fred got a good laugh out of that.
Fortunately I also took this picture, thinking it was Annabelle gearing up for her dive, and you can see her cheering and waiting her turn:
I tried video again for Mike's 100-yard breaststroke, because he likes to be able to critique his form afterwards. First, I almost did a repeat of what I did when I tried to tape Annabelle, so I had to start the recording again shortly after his dive. I was a little disappointed in how jerky the quality was:
A practice clip that I shot in the heat before came out fine, so I think it was just a combination of shaky hands and being too close to his lane.
What was NOT disappointing was his performance in the race. He was seeded last in his heat, but he finished fourth. At 1 minute, 17 seconds, and change, he had managed to shave a couple seconds off his time and was ecstatic when he came out of the water:
I shot more stills in burst mode for the freestyle relay that followed immediately. I didn't get anything as good as I got of NOT Annabelle, but here's his dive, which I pulled out of this original photo:
It's nice but not as cool as the one I got of NOT Annabelle. Still, swim pictures are really hard, and these are better than any others I've ever taken before, so that is progress. It's a little demoralizing for me to have trouble with something I'm used to being pretty good at. I'll keep working with my new toy though (and maybe even read the instruction book), and I hope to have progressively better pictures to share here soon.
Remember how I said on Sunday that I had gotten the cards ordered and how happy I was? Well, ha! Fred picked them up last night, and I was Not Happy when I saw them.
How many trips had I made to Walmart to make certain that what I was seeing on my monitor was what would come shooting out of the big printer at the store? At least 5 or 6. Maybe 7. When I picked up the Saturday sample, I knew that this was (FINALLY) The Picture, and so I ordered the cards.
The kids on the cards, however, were not the kids in The Picture. As pale and pasty as Boo Radley, they were so light as to appear almost transparent.
So this morning I marched into Walmart and got my money refunded with a minimum of fuss and bother. Tomorrow I get to go back, upload my picture from the kiosk in the photo department, order a single test card, evaluate, lather rinse repeat until I have a card worthy of ordering by the gross. Or maybe I'll just go to Walgreens instead. I don't know--I feel like Walmart and I have been through so much together at this point that I kind of hate to walk away. Maybe I'm just in an abusive retail relationship though.
And in other news, the particularly observant among you might notice that I have spruced up a little bit around here. I finally added some links in my BlogRoll that I've been meaning to add for some time. I'm not done yet though! I also went back and did a little catch-up blogging from our summer vacation. If you are so inclined, you can read about:
I'm so sorry. I promised a recipe, didn't I? I just couldn't get it together for today though. I sent in my indexing project late last night, and I spent today working on our Christmas card photo, going to the commissary, and going to Walmart (twice--as part of working on our photo). I need to finish shopping for Thanksgiving and get this filthy house clean before Fred's parents arrive on Wednesday, plus I've still got a few weeks of school left this semester, and I really should get cranking on that last paper.
As I've been editing our holiday photo, I've been thinking a lot about a book I'm reading called The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz. Booklist says:
Who woulda thunk it? Here we are, in the early years of the twenty-first century, being driven bonkers by the staggering array of consumer goods from which we must choose. Choosing something as (seemingly) simple as shampoo can force us to wade through dozens, even hundreds, of brands. We are, the author suggests, overwhelmed by choice, and that's not such a good thing. Schwartz tells us that constantly being asked to make choices, even about the simplest things, forces us to "invest time, energy, and no small amount of self-doubt, and dread." There comes a point, he contends, at which choice becomes debilitating rather than liberating. Did I make the right choice? Can I ever make the right choice? It would be easy to write off this book as merely an extended riff on that well-worn phrase "too much of a good thing," but that would be a mistake. Despite a tendency toward highfalutin language ("the counterfactuals we construct can be tilted upward"), Schwartz has plenty of insightful things to say here about the perils of everyday life.
I'm in the middle of a section about 2 types of people: maximizers and satisficers. The quick and dirty is that maximizers agonize over making the best possible choice every time, while satisficers aim for the "good enough." Can you guess which group is happier overall with their choices? It's not the maximizers, and I'm afraid that's me, especially when it comes to my photos.
When I started planning this picture, I was determined to be a satisficer this time. This was not going to be a repeat of the time that I had a friend bury us to our necks on the North Shore of Oahu, stick Santa hats on our heads, and take our picture, only to not use the picture because it just wasn't as good as what I had in mind.
Instead, I wound up sewing a dress for Annabelle and a shirt for Mike, both out of the same Hawaiian print, and dragging them back up to the North Shore. I don't remember which of the photos on the 2 rolls of film that I shot made it as The Picture, but here is a representative sampling:
They look pretty happy considering they each cried at least once that day. Of course, they were probably scared of me. I vaguely recall throwing a hissy fit of my own and saying something about "If YOU don't care if your grandparents have a nice picture to look at on Christmas morning . . . " but it's all fuzzy after that. So I wasn't going to do that! I was gonna be a satisficer if it killed us all.
I started off so well. On the way home from Saturday's swim meet, I told the kids to shower and change into reasonably coordinating clothes when we got home so we could go take the picture and I could get an early start on the cards this year. I already had a location scouted out, just down the street at the credit union, in front of a pretty bush. We tossed a couple barstools in the van and took off for our photoshoot. Not even an hour later, we were back at home with some 50-odd photos to choose from.
And that is where I began the long, lonely slide from satisficer to maximizer. First I had to decide which picture (or pictures, because now some card formats allow for more than one shot) had the best chance of making the grade. I solicited opinions from some friends and family members who are privvy to a sneak preview and wound up even more confused than I had been, as there was no clear winner. Since then, I've spent quite a few hours performing light cosmetic surgery on images of my children, blurring backgrounds, messing with colors and lighting levels, consulting with my aunt the Photoshop goddess, etc., etc., etc. And then, because what you see on the monitor isn't necessarily what is going to come out of that nice, big printer at the store, I've made a total of 3 trips to Walmart (and I loathe going to Walmart!) to pick up trial prints.
I think I have finally narrowed it down to just a couple of pictures and expect to make the final decision any day now. Then I just have to choose the best card format from the bazillion-and-one formats that are available. My inner satisficer is quietly weeping in the darkest corner of my soul, but the maximizer in me is hoping to have these cards out by Easter.
