Personal
Sometimes you have to stop and enjoy your work. I have to remind myself of that! I took the top photo when we first toured the house in February 2009. The bottom photo is what the backyard looks like today.
Here are some photos from our Father's Day backyard BBQ.
We didn't know it when we adopted her, but our dog Gianna came fully loaded. She knew how to sit, stay, retrieve, etc. It was something like buying a car blindly and then being pleasantly surprised it has leather and a sunroof.
With this inherited obedience training, we didn't have to start from scratch and got a lot of credit at the dog park that we didn't deserve.
I knew Gianna could learn more, and she wanted to learn more. We're nowhere close to Nana the Border Collie but we're taking steps forward. First, we taught her how to rollover, which she does a little spastically. Now I'm working on getting her to run in between my legs before fetching, hopefully moving toward her alternating crossing between my legs as I walk. We stumbled across Gianna's inclination to run through our legs when Amanda and I were playing catch with a softball in the front yard. She picked up a command right away.
I'm sure Gianna would be some world-class agility dog if she had the right training because she's got the instinct.
I have my own tricks to learn, too, with my new camera. There's a lot to tweak and learn, especially with video. Like teaching the dog a new trick, practice makes perfect, so I'm shooting a lot of photos again. It's a blast. Here are some more photos from a great afternoon at Chambers Creek Park in University Place.
I was talking to Amanda on the way home from work yesterday when she abruptly yelled, "Chickens!" and hung up the phone. This is what happened next.
Also, I love my wife so much for letting me share this with the world.
After months, perhaps years of anticipation, I finally pulled the trigger on a new camera body! I couldn't be a more excited owner of the Canon 6D, a relatively affordable full-frame DSLR. This won't be any comprehensive or technical review like at DPReview or Ken Rockwell, so if you want all the specs, head there. What's so special? Well, about a year and a half ago I bought a 7D, which is a crop frame body. Crop-frame bodies simply don't capture as much periphery in a frame. A 24mm lens looks like a 35mm on a crop-frame body. I loved the 7D for its speed and video capabilities at the time, but I ended up returning it because I wanted the full frame potential. Patiently, I waited for my time to come.
And I got sick of my trusty Canon 40D. I shot less and less because I got bored with the look and the capabilities became dated. Granted, Canon released it way back in 2007 -- centuries ago in technology years.
When the 6D came out, I was pumped. The Canon 5D Mark II had been the standard for pro-am full frame body in the Canon line-up for years, and the 6D made several improvements upon the incumbent with a slashed price point. First, the 6D has WiFi and GPS. This is CRAZY because with the Canon app on my iPhone, I can take a photo on my 6D, pull it up over WiFi on my phone and post it to Instagram like this. I can also control the camera remotely with the app, including ISO, shutter speed, aperture and focus -- all the essentials. You cannot capture video remotely, though if GoPro has that figured out it will be coming in short time for Canon. There is a noticeable delay between the time you push the shutter button on the phone and the camera actually taking the photo, but the alternative was this technology never existing. I can't complain.
Also the ISO jumps up to an absurd 25,600, which basically means you can shoot in the dark without a flash at low apertures. It's unreal.
Sergio is graciously letting me crash his kit bag until I get a new lens for the body. Did I mention high-quality photography is an expensive hobby? I'm swaying between a 35mm 1.4 or 24-70mm 2.8. The one drawback of the 6D so far is that the shutter speed maxes out at 1/4000, which is really odd. Many cameras have maxed at 1/8000 for years. This is a big deal because if I want to really open up the aperture and it's bright out, I'll overexpose the image. Nothing deal-breaking but it just excludes more times when I'd want to shoot at a lower aperture. If everything was perfect, there'd only be one camera body out there. Oh well.
Here are some test shots Amanda took for me in the evening with the Canon 6D. Pretty sweet, huh?! More high quality photography coming from here on out.
