End Of The Day Ramblings

Let me enumerate some of the going-ons at work today.

Dissed by somebody: 1
Compliments received: 3
Compliments paid: 0
People whose feelings I hurt: 1

All in all, a better than average day, but somewhat marred by the workload—as of this Tuesday I'm officially one of three developers working on a custom software project. I'm to spend 50% of my time on this and the other 50% on getting our core product out the door in a stable form. Unfortunately, I'm doing neither, mired as I am in service issues, documentation reviews, and high priority patches.

I'll have to pay some compliments tomorrow. Karma, you know.

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Shaula recently passed both her swimming and skating classes. She's at level 8/10 and 6/8, respectively. Little Matthew was and still is in preschool skating level 3. Oh well, he won't be the youngest in his class this time round.

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Here is an "unposed*" existing-light picture of some [Sugar Maple?] leaves at the local park. It's actually very difficult to make such a shot with an SLR without also capturing one's feet or tripod legs in the frame.



One solution is to use a tripod with a reversible centre column or an extension boom, but this requires lengthy setup and tear-down times, and the camera's viewfinder is likely going to end up at an awkward position.

But with my trusty little Canon A80, it was simply a matter of holding the camera out at arm's length and pointing the camera perpendicular to the ground, and then swinging the LCD panel out and then rotating it 90° to face me. The extended LCD panel also afforded very steady hands. I italicized perpendicular above to emphasize the shallow depth of field resulting from the low light level and necessarily wide open lens. The leaves had to be square-on to the camera sensor for everything to be in focus.

*I still feel guilty about my previous completely artificial—each leaf was placed by hand—photo, surely an affront to Nature. I have redeemed myself.