Snow Day and GIFs

I took my last final at Crowder yesterday, and I picked up two of my cousins, Kendra and Bretton on my way home. My neighbor, Rachel, also came over; and the four of us had a blast... blasting each other with snowballs ;P ...and sledding.

Then we tried a few things to add some excitement... like riding a lawn wagon down the hill. Well, that failed. It didn't go fast at all. So then we built a ramp...

So there is our makings of the ramp... gathering snow and patting it down.

Bretton... always known for his facial expressions! :)

This was my first time going down... so my camera was passed off to the others to take pictures.

I look like I'm about to launch off of this earth or something. Lol

I have quite a few animated GIFs included in this post because we took soooo many pictures :)

Many thanks to Josh for hooking me up with Photoshop again so that I could make them!

Poor Rachel... she said this one hurt pretty bad! :/ But she was a really great sport!

 His face on the last frame of this one cracks me up... it looks exactly like the "weary face" emoticon. 

Oops! A little trip-up on the ramp! Haha

Yeah, I'm not sure what happened here, haha, but it's something to laugh about anyway! ;D

He landed it! o.O

It was a bunch of fun, both taking pictures and ramping!

Well, enjoy your weekend! 

If you are a college student, enjoy your month break off of school!

And if you live in my area of the country, get ready to enjoy the snow/rain we are supposed to get tomorrow! :)

-MarLeahJoy

Lucinda

Heather, this post is for you :) I got permission to put these on the blog just so you could see some more "people pictures" ;)

Lucinda called me up on Sunday and said she needed a picture of her to add to their family's christmas card. So I was more than happy to get outside and get a few shots of her down at her house. She lives in the house that is just down the hill from us, and I have to say I really enjoy having her close. Even though she's older than me and she's my "sister's friend", I claim her as my friend, too. ;)

The number one thing I like about her (beyond her bubbliness, of course!) is that she likes to be active. She has already agreed to go bicycling with me... but then it snowed. 

I know she won't be living here too much longer, so I hope the weather will permit us to get out and do stuff together before she has to go.

-MarLeahJoy

My Kinda Day!

I know that my blogging is so sporadic. Haha, my apologies. ;)

After about an hour of my parents agonizing about my safety, they decided that they would let me get out on the "icy" roads so I could go to the Holiday Fest at the Carver Park in Diamond.

It's actually an event for little children and we used to go to them all the time when I was young, but this time I was going to see a friend from college who volunteers there every time they have an event.

This is my friend and her mother who is an amazing seamstress and makes a new dress for Holly each event they have here. Her dress hem was lined with the most delicate beadwork. It was unbelievable! 

The little children at work with their crafts.

Museums and displays get fairly boring to me, but there is something about getting a glimpse back in time that I love... regardless if it looks like museum. Ha!

 When I saw these binoculars out on the deck, I had an idea to take a picture through them... and try to make it look like it does when you are actually looking through them.

So these are my attempts!

After the event was over, and most people left, I went on the little trail there.

I am such a sucker for trails -- it doesn't even have to be a spectacular trail.

Okay, I have to insert a few comments here:

First: That picture I took of myself was quite a painful process! It might look like a fun thing to do... blow snow out of your hands... Ha! but really my hands were soooo frozen and it hurt to even try to put my gloves on. Yeah, but it was worth it ;)

Second: I love to be all matchy-matchy with my Facebook profile and cover pictures and I realized that this picture matched my snowflake picture perfectly! That made me happy ;D

(there you go for all you non-Facebook users) :)

Just some ice and some macro ice.

I wished my family was there with me at this point so we could get a family picture here. 

But, alas! All I got was one of me trying to represent my whole family. ;)

{Umm... and it's a good thing there was no one else around or I would have felt really stupid setting up my camera and running up there to take a picture of myself. ;P }

Once I was completely cold, icy, freezing, numb, raw, rosie-cheeked, red-nosed, and chilled through-and-through, I hopped in my car and drove home a very happy girl. :)

-MarLeahJoy

Snowfall

We had perfect fall weather Monday and Tuesday, then BAM! on Thursday and Friday we get snow!

I like it though. I do really want to go outside and be active though, but it doesn't take me long to realized that I really want to be back indoors snuggled by a fire.

I've seen several photographers take amazing snowflake macros recently. And when I saw them, I mentally thought "Cool thing to do one day... I'll go pin it so I don't forget it."

Well, in less than a week we had our own snow. So, I went outside and began to follow their tips and I was like, "What's wrong!?" I wasn't getting anything good. It turns out that macro photography (with a magnifying glass) is really probably not something for one person to do because you have to hold the camera and the glass and keep moving them both until you get it perfectly in focus. 

Plus, your hands are shaking because it's COLD! So I put my camera on continuous and took a ton of pictures to get some steady ones.

The picture on the right is kind of hard to see, but it is a cluster of snowflakes... it reminds me of geometric planes, haha.

-MarLeahJoy

A Lesson on the Lensbaby

I had to get some shots for a powerpoint presentation I'm giving tomorrow about my Lensbaby Composer Pro + Edge 80 optic (now sold together). And for no real reason I feel like sharing them. 

Because, why not?

Actually, Einstein said that if you cannot explain it simply, then you do not understand it well enough. So this might be a test of my knowledge... 

So here goes.

This is the difference in aperture sizes. F/2.8 means that the opening in the lens (which lets the light in) is open really wide (as far as it goes in my Edge 80 optic). F/22 means that the hole is really small so it lets very little light in. So, for this example I went ahead and cranked my ISO (how sensitive the camera's sensor is to pick up the light) all the way up to 6400 so that's why you can see more grain in the picture.

But, the main difference seen in the two examples is how much is actually in focus. 

With f/2.8, the larger opening allows the light to come in to the camera from more angles

With f/22, it creates "deep focus", which is saying that more things are in focus because the light rays coming through the lens are more parallel to each other.

Actually, that was just a lesson on aperture, not necessarily the Lensbaby, because every lens can change aperture.

This next example however, is exclusive to the Lensbaby Composer Pro. But first, let's see what the lens even looks like...

Image from Lensbaby.com

This is the Composer Pro base and the Edge 80 optic put together. It can tilt around in anyway you would like. 

When you have it positioned straight, it will act as any other lens... where the objects in focus is determined by the aperture size and the focal distance you choose.

But when you tilt the lens, it bends the plane of focus to the angle that the lens is tilted... resulting in a "slice of focus" that is now not based on how far the object is from you, but how drastically you tilt the lens.

Image from Lensbaby.com

For most of you, this is just a lot of "blah, blah, blah" that you will likely skim over. But if nothing else, I think I educated myself a little bit more by creating this post... :P

Happy December!

-MarLeahJoy