Family
Heartfelt updates about family milestones and everyday moments. From taking Mazie to college and annual visits to the Renaissance Festival to Swedish‑pancake breakfasts and VR outings with the kids, this category celebrates togetherness.
- The lighting setup I had was barely adequate. I had to take every picture up 2 stops in Lightroom after importing. The room I was shooting in had plenty of ambient light, and I still was barely up to par.
- Focus is beyond critical. I was really frustrated that many of the pictures I had didn’t have crystal clear focus. I was focusing manually of course, but right away I noticed that if the subjects eyes aren’t absolutely locked on focus the picture really suffers. They looked fine, and completely in focus, in the viewfinder. With older kids that will sit still I learned the power of the live preview mode on my camera to get perfect focus. This made a huge difference.
- You need a big room. I was shooting with about 7-10 feet from the subject. That wasn’t really enough room to get the framing I wanted.
- Lack of strong light forced me to keep my f-stop really low, and as a result my depth of field really small. This amplified the focus problem. Additionally, I had to keep my shutter speed pretty slow which made it hard to shoot the really little kids.
- I’m not sure why, but I shot the entire time with my Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L. It is by far the best glass I have, but at 70mm on the short end it’s still long. I should have tried a couple of other lenses, and will next time.
First Shot at Homemade Ice Cream
Cooking was definitely the action for this years Father’s Day gifts. Tammy signed me up for a couple more of the Grillmaster cooking classes at Kitchen Window. Mazie got me something I’ve wanted to play around with for a while, an ice cream maker. We gave it a go for the first time tonight with a basic vanilla ice cream recipe. Mazie put the ingredients together and I did the measuring, we then poured it into the machine and started it up.
The machine cranked away and the ice cream slowly came together. The machine has an open top so that you can add ingredients while the ice cream is still mixing, but it’s also handy to dip a spoon in and give the ice cream a test. The final product was delicious and it was a lot of fun to make.
This was a learning batch. I think I should have ran it in the machine a bit longer than I did. It was solid and held in place, but I think I could have gotten it a bit more solid. The biggest thing I learned was that in addition to freezing the ice cream makers bowl, I should also freeze the bowl I’m going to put the finished ice cream in. I placed it in a glass bowl and some of the ice cream melted right away on contact with the glass. Need to keep everything cold!
Happy birthday to not you. — Mazie
Unordered Lists to Comma Separated List
I was tweaking some layout in Tumblr today and I really wanted to take a list of tags and display them with proper grammar. For example, I wanted to have commas in the right places and to use the proper singular and plural forms as needed. My goal was something like.
At 9pm with tags Mazie, Baseball and St. Paul Saints.
Or, if there was only one tag.
At 9pm with tag Mazie.
The trick is that Tumblr only provides a way to iterate through the list of tags and you can’t do any funky logic in there. This is actually a benefit, since it forced me to figure out the right way to do this with CSS. After a little searching I found a really old post from 2005 explaining comma-separated list elements that was pretty close to what I wanted. I did some tweaking on it and came up with the following CSS block to do exactly what I wanted.
/* Styling for a comma separated list of values from a ul */
ul.comma-separated { display: inline; list-style: none; margin: 0; padding: 0; }
ul.comma-separated li { display: inline; }
/* Put the correct label in front, this should be plural for multiple tags */
ul.comma-separated li:first-child:before { content:"tags "; }
/* The comma we are looking for. */
ul.comma-separated li:before { content: ", "; white-space: pre;}
/* The last element should not have a comma and should be followed with a period. */
ul.comma-separated li:last-child:before { content:" and "; white-space: pre;}
ul.comma-separated li:last-child:after { content: "."; }
/* Special case required to handle a ul with only one item. */
ul.comma-separated li:only-child:before { content:"tag "; }
This will take a block of HTML like this
<ul class="comma-separated">
<li>Mazie</li>
<li>Baseball</li>
<li>St. Paul Saints</li>
</ul>
and display it exactly how I want.
This was a great exercise. I’m not a CSS guru and I don’t tend to look to CSS to solve this type of problem. I immediately wanted to start working some magic inside of a loop in the code and handle the logic there. This is much simpler, and has the huge benefit of being able to modify the contents after page load with Javascript and have the formatting dynamically adjust as needed.
Now I just need to move this super smart CSS into my WordPress site as well.
Up
Mazie was ecstatic to see Up. She was giddy running to the theater to see it. We all really enjoyed it.
Ya know what Dad? I actually don’t care. — Mazie (almost 4)
Yesterday our neighbors across the street daughter had found a batch of very small baby kittens. There were four kittens, and Mazie took a turn holding each and every one. She loved it. No, we didn’t keep any of them.
Sea Monkeys
Tammy’s brand new, never played before, softball team has their first game tonight. I can’t wait to hear the recap!
Mazie decided to do a little project with all of the dog toys the other day. Pretty cool. (Don’t obsess about the door frame. This is a panorama off the iPhone that wasn’t intended to be a panorama.)
“Well, I’m full from food, but I’m not full from dessert.” - Mazie
Well, I’m full from food, but I’m not full from dessert. — Mazie
Mazie and I went out for dinner tonight at Lion’s Tap! Daddy’s little princess went in her dress-up clothes. She was adorable and brought smiles to everyone she saw.
I don’t want Daddy in our family anymore! — Mazie (mad!)
Mazie had her first ever scuffle at pre-school. Seems her and her friend disagreed and a scratch on the cheek resulted.
Mazie Mastering her Skuut
It was the first weekend in April, but that didn’t get it warm. In fact we had snow overnight this weekend and woke up to at least an inch of wet snow in the morning. That didn’t stop us from heading outside and for Mazie to spend some more time mastering her Skuut. She is very excited to “get a bicycle and not even need stabilizers”.
“I wanna watch a TV show!” — Mazie
Conversation with Mazie…
View-Master
I was flipping through the March 14th copy of The Economist and ran across “The final reel” story. Fisher-Price is no longer going to make the View-Master. It was an odd article. I felt rather sad. I think because I distinctly remember as a little boy looking through my own View-Master and being amazed at the images and also completely obsessed trying to figure out how it worked. The experience continued this summer as Mazie enjoyed looking at her very own View-Master.
Going forward kids will only be able to get reels of animated characters and other licensed, copyrighted characters for the View-Master.
First Try at Studio Photography
Yesterday I took my first attempt at doing studio photography. I’ve done a variety of different shooting, but I hadn’t yet attempted to set up lighting and do studio style portrait work. I’ve accumulated the bare essentials to do this over the last few months. I’ve got a Manfrotto Background Support system, one continuous light and the wireless system for my two Canon flashes. I learned quickly that is barely enough lighting to shoot with.
I got everything set up and did photos of Mazie and her cousin Nora, followed by shots of our neighbors three kids. Free photos of your kids is a pretty easy way to practice studio portrait shooting. 🙂
Lessons Learned
I did a little bit of searching and found a few studios that you can rent for a half-day. I think I might try that to see how it goes with a real lighting setup.
Mazie and I are reading and relaxing at Cafe Mozart this morning. Really great espresso.
Mazie skiing for the first time ever. She did really awesome. Ruled the bunny hill. She went down it probably 20 times.
