Experiments with Night Photography

I used my GorillaPod to take this shot with a 30s exposure. I probably should have bumped the ISO up to 800, but I'm pretty paranoid about noise after some of what I've seen at 1600 and 3200. I also might not have thought of it at the time, I suppose.

I really wish I'd had a regular tripod with me; I've only done a very little night photography before, and it would have been really cool to be able to set up in a position in which I could actually get some light on Dawn. Of course, she still would probably have been pretty fuzzy - it's not easy to hold still enough for a photo for 30 seconds!

My SLR, a Canon 20D, only goes to 30 second exposures, unfortunately; that's just long enough for this photo to begin to show the movement of the stars. I hope to get one of these very cool remote shutter controllers because it lets you set exposures for a lot longer (just shy of 100 hours, though I doubt I'd ever want to do that, and I imagine you'd have to have the camera plugged into continuous power rather than using a battery). It would have been fun to do an hour-long exposure.

I also wish I'd taken a few more pictures. Dawn was cold, so I cut it short and went back inside with her, and this 15 second exposure really would have been better after 30 seconds.

Free? Really?

One of our tires has a little divot in the sidewall; our Toyota dealer said we should replace it. Our neighbor, who could be a car mechanic if he wanted, said maybe we should rotate it to the back, but that it wasn't a problem. And the people at Goodyear said the same.

And then they rotated them for free, and checked the brakes, because they're Goodyear tires! How 'bout that?

Pop Culture Influence Begins

Rachel - eating breakfast, swaying in her seat, smiling.

Dylan: "What music are you hearing, Rachel?"

Rachel - smirks: "a song Gracie taught me."

Dylan: "Oh? What's it called?"

Rachel: "Oops, I did it again."

Thanks for nothing!

This post on Parent Hacks reminded me of a story my friend Brad told me years ago. His kids were given a very noisy fire truck, and it bugged the heck out of him and his wife, Sue, for weeks. Until one day it broke! Everything about it worked fine, except there was no more sound. Ah, the relief. Until not three days later:

"Hey, I got a friend at work to fix the fire truck!"

"Dear! Do you know how long it took me to break it!?"

Also Sit Down

My mother reminded me of a story from when Rachel was only around a year or so old. She has always been and advanced talker, but at one time if she was sitting and wanted you to sit with her, she would say 'also sit down'. One day, she said to my mother 'also sit down' and when I guess Carol didn't sit down fast enough, Rachel said "have a seat, Carol!"