Digitizing Photos

Yay!  We wrapped up a big project tonight.   We finished scanning all of our photo albums.  It will be exciting to be able to take all of our photos with us as we head off to Kenya now that they fit neatly on my laptop.

It is also fun to have them accessible rather than off in some album somewhere.  For example, take a look at a few gems that were in the last album we scanned.  They are B&W photos I took in 1999 when Buddy was born.

Presenting Buddy to the girls when they came to visit at the hospital.

Buddy's first day.

Ed sleeping.

Miss Bookworm was holding books even back then.

Reading in Bed

After a long week of work, I came home a little bit bedraggled tonight. After changing out of my work clothes, I plopped down on my bed and started reading a copy of Advanced Photography where I found a sweet article about painting with light. It was so good, in fact, that it motivated me to get off my duff and paint my own picture.

A special thanks to Miss Bookworm and Buddy who helped me with some of the logistics of the shot.

Breakfast Time-Lapse Video

I am obviously on a video kick right now. My place of employment issued me a new MacBook Pro this year and I have been playing around with iMovie, Garage Band, and the like. Here is a time-lapse video of our family having breakfast last Saturday morning.



A special thanks to one of my students, Brad, who tipped me off on how to hack my small Canon Powershot camera so I could program it to automatically take a photo every 5 seconds. This saved me from having to go out and buy an intervalometer.

The Blanket Monster

I tried something new this weekend with the kids. They had a blast.

Building a Diffusing Screen - Snow Day Part 2

On Tuesday while we were still at school it was looking pretty likely that there would be a snow day the next day. "What will you do if we have a snow day?" a colleague asked me. "I would go to Home Depot and buy some stuff to build a diffusing screen so I can take better portraits of my kids," I replied. Well, we got our snow day and I hesitated about driving out in the snow, but since I had indicated that I would, I did it. I went out when the roads were probably the worst, but I did get to help push the mail truck up a hill.

Here is the diffusing screen I built using a cloth shower curtain and a few PVC pipes. (The screen goes between the flash and the subject to soften the light.)

I just had time to snap a couple of photos today, but not time to really work with it. As you can see in the photo below, now I need to make a reflector to add a little fill on the shadow side.