Sunday, September 19, 2010

Apple Picking... Without the Apples

Hi everyone! Long time no "chat", huh?

I put off and put off posting in the hopes I'd have some stitching to show for the past few weeks... and well... nothing has miraculously stitched itself while I slept. I actually did start Olga, though! Yay me! But, Olga got hit with some frogs... I had to rip out everything I stitched, b/c I started too far to the middle and realized that I would only end up with about 1/8" on the opposite edge if I continued. I just wasn't paying attention because I was in such a rush to work on her. That'll teach me... well, it should teach me, but it probably won't, lol!! That was this past week on one of my lunch hours and I haven't touched her since. Poor Olga. Retract your claws dear Olga. I promise to take you to work with me this week.

Yesterday, my picture taking friend Melissa and I attempted to take our two children (and our "dudes") to the local pick your own orchard for some apple pickin' and picture takin'. We came up with the plan early in the week and both of us spent the rest of the week plotting our photographic plan of attack. When we arrived, we were informed that the apples weren't ready yet... say what?? But your website says... (and the attempted 'from scratch' pie crust for use with said apples? Yeah. We won't talk about that m'kay?)... Ah well. We cut our losses and headed over to their berry patch.

I had two photographic lessons reinforced while we were there. 1) High in the sky sun is a photographer's enemy. 2) Never believe what the LCD screen on your camera is telling you - especially when you are standing in bright, non-shady, almost directly overhead sunlight. Ever. Just don't do it. Trust me. Why?? Oh. Well, hypothetically speaking (because I know this lesson already and would neeever allow myself to be tricked) you might look at the pictures you just took and think "wow, those are really overexposed." Then you might think "Wow, I'm a photographic genius! I'll fix this! I'll just drop my exposure compensation a few stops and all will be well with my photographic world again." And if you do that you might (okay, you will) end up with pics that look like they are properly exposed ("Oh, self... you are soooo silly! They just look dark on the screen b/c it's so bright outside!"), but in reality are nearly unsalvageably dark, and which can only be made "presentable" by applying some special effects in PhotoShop Elements and pretending you took the pics that way because you wanted to apply said special effects in post processing.

Anyway. Here are some pics from yesterday. Enjoy!!









Okay, that's it for me! Have a great week, everyone!!
~Robin