It may seem odd to some cyber-savvy uber-dorks, but real life does on occasion get in the way of blogging, even on a low-rent blog like this one. We’ve all been pretty busy as of late - in a good way. Mark has been keeping me busier than a one legged man in one of those contests you’ve heard about. We’ve been renting apartments and getting tenants moved in just as fast as we can, at what I believe is safe to call an all-time record pace.

So. Family blogging has fallen by the wayside, and I do apologize to those who long for updated photos and stories of the kids/grandkids. We’ll try to get some recent stuff posted up here in the coming days.

For instance:

If you notice anything that seems a little wonky, let me know.

Until I get it all sorted out, you can peruse the Photo Albums here.

In the meantime, ponder this:

Here I sit, listening to George Winston’s December and Linus and Lucy albums as they stream through the aether to my computer, countless bits of paper and packaging and wire twisty ties and whatnot strewn all over the front room, browsing through the couple hundred Christmas season photos I’ve taken thus far.

I’d say it’s about time to share some, wouldn’t you?

Cameron’s a real ham for the camera and Seth is just a dang good looking kid with big blue eyes.

Kristina and I both stayed up fairly late, but still didn’t manage to catch a glimpse of Santa Claus when he visited our house. Next time I’ll rig up some motion detectors to my camera and catch him in the act.

David got his first real bicycle and Isabella got her very own MP3 player, complete with about ten different Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson albums (amongst others) courtesy of her dear old dad.

All that remains now is our epic journey to Oklahoma to spend some time with some of Kristina’s family, and our Christmas season for this year will come to an end.

More photos are available in the photo albums.

It’s not as dramatic a demonstration as it could be, as I really wasn’t intending to post this series of photos. I was just messing around with my new tripod*, experimenting with taking long-exposure shots. Turns out I ended up with a series of photographs that demonstrates the effects of changes in aperture quite nicely.

The series ranges from f/1.8, 0.8 sec. in the first frame to f/11, 30 sec. in the last, all at ISO 100. To keep that ISO and get longer than a 30-second exposure and thus be able to use smaller apertures, I’d have had to go to bulb mode, and as I don’t have a remote shutter release I would have had to hold down the button manually and just try to get as close as possible to accurate exposure times. That’s just too much trouble to go to for an improvised demonstration.

You’ll notice that in the first frame at f/1.8, the depth of field covers little more than just the eye-bud nearest the camera. The rest is a blur.

As you progress through the series toward f/11 you see that the depth of field increases to include a much greater portion of the frog’s body, ending with almost the entire body being in relatively good focus. The background too becomes more and more defined.

Depth of field is inversely related to aperture; the larger the aperture, the smaller the depth of field, and vice-versa. By using a large-ish aperture you can control which elements of your photograph are in focus, and therefore emphasized, while keeping the rest of the background and/or foreground relatively obscured. Alternatively, by using a very small aperture, you can achieve a much larger depth of field, bringing more of your photograph into sharp focus.

Portrait and close-up photography lends itself to using larger apertures, allowing the main subject to “pop” out of the background into sharp focus. At the other end of the spectrum, landscape and architecture photographers generally want as much of their photograph to be in sharp focus as possible, and thus tend to favor the use of smaller apertures.

This is a basic, basic concept in photography, and anyone with more than a passing interest in pursuing photography as a hobby will already know this stuff by heart. But it’s good to see a concept demonstrated in simplified form so as to better understand it “in the field”, so to speak.

* The Induro CX213 with SA-23 ballhead. Induro is the American-imported version of Benro, which is the less-expensive, Chinese-made, almost- just-as-good copy of French-born, now Italian-made Gitzo tripods, which are widely regarded as being at the top of the tripod food chain.

It’s not that she’s just now holding her head up or anything, it’s just that she’s getting more comfortable being on her stomach without getting irritable.  Between that and the kicking, I’d say she’s going to be a right fine crawler when the time comes.