Lensbabies Part Two

And here's one more from the Lensbaby/film experiment. Birthday flowers were involved.

The K1000s came out to play

My first camera was a Pentax K1000, it was a Christmas present my freshman year of high school. For those of you who don't know, the K1000 is the quintessential student camera. It's fully manual, has the barest of controls, almost no electronics, is built like a brick and weighs about the same. It's the kind of camera that would be on the A-team if you were plotting an expedition to Kafiristan with Peachy Carnehan and Daniel Dravot. If I were Charlton Heston, I'd have something to say about my K1000 and my cold, dead hands.

Unfortunately, as much as I love my K1000, it's gone kinda by the wayside. Digital photography isn't just incrementally better, it's so much better as to qualify as an entirely different and superior way of doing things. Now I can take twenty times as many pictures because I know that I'm not paying for them (or rather, I already have paid for them). I get instant results, so if I mess up a picture, I can adjust and try again. I can work wonders in post-processing, turning crap into something I'd actually want to show my friends. I'm sorry, poor little K1000, I love you but you're just not on the A-team anymore.

A little while ago, on a whim, I got a Pentax K-mount Lensbaby 3G.
This was precipitated by the photo-contest over at The Range Life, in which I've been much more of a bystander than a participant. The main thing that I noticed is that most of the photographers there don't use out-of-focus areas in their composition. Everything is in-focus, at least that's what they're striving for.

So there I was, with a funny little lens, and only my K1000 to mount it on. The scene could've been straight out of my elementary school rendition of Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer. K1000 to the rescue. I buckled down, bought a roll of film, took some photos without knowing immediately how they turned out (gasp), got them developed, and scanned the negatives.

This also resulted in Shelley busting out her cute little K1000 and a geek-out session where I drooled over her sexy little 50mm/F2.0 Pentax prime. As great as digital is, it will be a sad world when parents don't buy high school students moderately priced cameras that are built to last a lifetime. I have a hope, that maybe once digital photography gets a little more settled, we'll see a return of a $300 SLR body that is "good enough," not packed with every feature under the sun, and built to stand up to years of use.

So, this is all a very long-winded of saying that it's really film's fault that I haven't posted on the blog in a while. Simply put, I've been waiting to finish a roll of film. There will be a few successive blog posts, since that roll of film contains a backlog of photos from various events.

In the mean time I'll leave you with one photo from the last hurrah of my K1000 and the first hurrah of the season from the Wenatchee river.

Parental Release Forms

My friends and co-workers Rachael and Scott have a small farm on Marrowstone Island (near Port Townsend) where they have 3 goats. Two have had babies in the last week and Maddi and I took a road trip to see them. There are four altogether, two boys and two girls. The boys are named Chop and T-bone, which I'm a little pissed about because I claimed T-bone as my future dog's name long ago and was not consulted about this decision.

The girls are still awaiting names, but we talked today about tree names- babies often get named with a theme and each name starts with the same letter as their mother's so you can tell the lineage.





I can't tell them apart for the life of me, so I can't tell you which one this is. See more photos here.


The mamas and the babies love this mound of dirt piled up from a recent septic system dig - some kind of king of the hill complex or something. Scott says they're just learning how to headbutt- amazing how independent they are for only being four days old.

Oh and the title is in reference to Rachael's response to my question about putting the babies on the blog- while we did not get goat mama's permission, no animals were harmed in the making of this posting.

Pleasing the 4-5 year old set

Wow, I can't believe it's been so long since a post. Sorry about that- hopefully we didn't lose anyone.


Here are two successful projects for the 4-5 year olds I know. My nephew Will got the Fuzzbot shirt. For a while I walked around the house after him saying bee boop bop every time he poked Fuzzbots buttons.

My friend Cathy's son Connor wanted fingerless gloves so much he was trying to cut the fingers off of his regular gloves. So I came up with a simple pattern that worked out ok, though I think they're still too short. These are the kind of gloves that will need to be remade every month or two- they seem to be well worn (see photo- yes, Cathy says he is actually asleep).

Header Photos

There's been a little bit of interest expressed in our cute little header photo. When I figured out how to do it, I discovered that there were very few tutorials out there on standard ways to mess with your blog template. Fortunately, I'm mildly proficient in HTML, so I figured it out on my own. Here's the step-by-step for everyone else:

1. Get a picture.
   
   
2. Resize the picture to be 692 pixels wide. It can be a different size, but then you have to change the sizes of everything else in your template. If you know how to do that, then you certainly don't need my help.
   
   
3. Host the picture on a webserver.
   
   Unfortunately, Blogger.com gets cranky if you try to link to photos they host (anyone know how to get around this?). So, I host our graphics using my UW student web hosting. Flickr and Photobucket are probably also good options.
   
   
4. Change the template
1. Under your blog settings click on "Template"
2. Select "Edit HTML"
3. Find in the template something that says:
   
   <div id="'header-wrapper"> ... </div>
   
   This may span several lines.
   
   
4. Change it to look like this:
   
   <div id="'header-wrapper'">
   <img src="http://........" />
   </div>
   
   Substitute in the URL of your photo where the ellipsis is.
   
   
5. Preview the template. If everything looks good, then save.
   

I should note that I'm still reading a bit about how Blogger.com's template widgets work. In plain English, I may come up with a better way of doing this at some point.

Peeps

It's that time of year and that means I get to share one of my favorite sites of all time. Here is my gift to you.

Wak-Wak

Last weekend I rode in the Chilly Hilly, known as one of the 4 best rides in the U.S., I hear. A team of us from work pulled Wak-Wak (Lushootseed for frog) the whole 33 miles in the rain. I did a very respectable 7 miles with Wak-wak, including a couple of very steep hills. Wak-Wak and his tiny wheel make it impossible to stand up on a bike, which is something I usually do to get up steep hills (my commute has made me a pro at hills if nothing else), so there were a few tenuous moments when I was sure I was going down. But I survived, as did Adam, my coworker with the most fabulous shop-class goggles. Ray was the star, pulling 13 miles all the way home. Oh yes, and there were capes.

Adam got the glory on the front page of the Bainbridge paper, with a picture the size of a postage stamp. I think this is the shot that was in the paper.

Check out this shot looking down on the 4000+ riders as they ride off the ferry.