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Kitsnaps: Oxford Botanic Gardens
I’d brought my Big Camera (the DSLR) to Oxford because we’d been told 10 days for recovery for my dad’s brain surgery (he’s doing well, he goes back next week to get the power turned on), and I knew Oxford was beautiful and I wanted to spend a few mornings and afternoons taking pictures.
Then Dad did so brilliantly they were threatening to send him home after 3 days (!), so I got up Very Early and went out with my camera, because damned if I was gonna have lugged the camera and an extra lens all the way to Oxford and not use it!
And I do mean Very Early, because I wanted the sunrise light, so I was out on the streets before 6am. And then the light had changed by 7:15 or so and because EUROPE there weren’t any damn cafes or anything at all open yet and the Botanic Gardens, which I wanted to go to, didn’t open until 9, so I spent a great deal of time wandering around in an exhausted haze.
Eventually the gardens opened, and to my offense I had to pay a fiver to get in (Dublin’s are free, and better), but I got some pictures I loved, so it was all good. :)
This is the most Stock Photography photograph I’ve ever taken. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s so Stock Photography that I find it ridiculous. :) It needs a little bit of fill light on the foreground to really make it pop, and while it’s probably possible to do that with Photoshop, I didn’t know how any more than I had a fill flash with me, so it’s not quite as Perfectly Stock as it could be, but it’s Pretty Stock. :)
I should probably not love the intense saturation of colors as much as I do, but, well, I do, and so that’s my photography aesthetic. And to be fair, these tulips in the morning sunshine really were very strongly colored!
These tulips are METAL, folks. Look at those ragged edges!
I am deeply, deeply in love with this photo. My goal was a crisp close-up with the petals rising toward the lens in sharper (but inevitably blurred because focal point) focus, but lacking three hands, I couldn’t hold the camera properly and hold the flower *still* in the mild wind, so there was an even softer focus than I’d intended and I just love it.
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Kitsnaps: Rimfrost
More from the photo archives; a glorious winter day in 2003, where I lay in the snow and took pictures of rimfrosted trees, and of my puppy snoofling me. <3
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Kitsnaps: Eklutna Lake
Sadly, no, I have not been home lately to take these pictures; they’re from 2003, when several of us went out kayaking on Eklutna Lake, outside of Anchorage, on a ridiculously glorious day.
I’m going through my digital photo archives, trying to clean them up and get rid of all the terrible pictures, which is something I’ve been meaning to do for, uh, ever. Mostly it’s not very hard, but these Alaska photos do make me homesick.
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Kitsnaps: Two-Toed Sloth
I actually brought my camera out to the zoo the other day. It’d been almost a year since I’d used it. *wince* Anyway, among other things, I kind of randomly decided to set it to RAW format, because, well, because.
I will never go back to shooting just JPG, OMG.
I mean, I knew RAW was supposed to be swell, but I did kind of assume it would be difficult to learn to manipulate the format. It’s not; there’s a Photoshop thing that opens up to deal with it automatically, and there’s almost certainly more that I can do if I put some effort into learning. But OMG, the differences in the SHADOWS, the depths of black! Those alone are worth it! So exciting!
Anyway, on top of that, the sloths were out eating corn and I got the best picture of one I’ve ever gotten. :)
I need to get my eyes checked, though. Or get different contacts, because I was not having an easy time focusing the big lens, which is the one lens I have that isn’t autofocus and which I have a hard time with anyway because it’s just a little too heavy for me to manage well and at least half my pictures with it are out of focus. But this was worse than usual, and anything in focus was more luck and the assumption that it really had to be in focus rather than my ability to see that it was.
But at least the sloth turned out. :)
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family, food, funny
Nephew: Excuse me? I have an important question. How powerful is Captain Britain? Could he beat Superman?
Me, having already described the “the one who serves the story best” aspect of this kind of question and delighted to be asked: I *believe* CB’s power is drawn from the spirit of the British people, so potentially yes but probably only under certain circumstances.
Nephew: Right, great, okay. How about Captain Britain against Juggernaut?
Me: They’d go toe to toe.
Nephew departs, totally happy ♥ :)
I made Blackberry Pi on Monday, in celebration of Pi Day. It set up *perfectly* and is a wonderful blend of tart and smooth. SO NUMMY!
This morning I made Lazy Baker’s Cinnamon Rolls, which is to say, I used storebought puff pastry for the dough. I thought they were rather wonderful, although the other people in the house thought the regular ones with homemade dough are better. Ted, however, conceded that this was a lot *easier*. :)
Last summer I said, for some reason, that I had quite a lot of grey hair at my temples. Dad, to whom I was speaking, said, “Nah, that’s just the sunlight hitting it,” then leaned forward for a better look and was like, “…oh, no, wow, you’re right, you really do…”
It’s possible I should stop bleaching my hair for the movie-style Rogue stripe and go with Classic Rogue, streaked at the temples, since that’s what my hair is doing anyway. Although it *does* have a movie-style streak of white. It’s just that it’s in the middle of my head–you can see it in the part, in this picture–rather than at the front. You had ONE JOB, hair…!“Mmmm,” Indy said, breathing in the scent of the new book, “it smells like fresh ink!”
And last, because the above was clearly not enough pictures, I’ve done another couple pages in the Elfquest coloring book, and the second page of the graphic novel ‘coloring book’. The latter is actually really satisfying because I can do a panel and feel like I’ve Accomplished Something, but the color on all of these is particularly bad because I just took photos instead of trying to scan them in. The originals are prettier. :)
This was a lot of purple. It really doesn’t look like it, it looks more heavily green here, but it’s a *lot* of purple.
I did this all in one day, of which I am disproportionately proud. Apparently I really am five. And the colors are so much nicer for real than in the photo, but oh well. Also, does anybody else worry about Savah and her skinny neck holding that giant gold plate on her head all the time, or is that just me…?
I’m going to try to get to a convention with the Pinis sometime and get them to sign this thing. Even if I only have twelve pages done. :)
