First canning session of the year

On By stefrobrtsIn food, jack, naviLeave a comment

I pulled out the turkey fryer (electric water-bath canner) and got ready for a marathon canning session today. I found a bucket of pickles out in the garden!

Some were really big, and some were just in the 3-4 inch size. I decided to slice up the little ones into spears for dills, and slice up the big ones into chips for sweet pickles.

8 pints of quick pack kosher dills…

And 8 pints of sweet pickle chips – yum! I was down to just one jar left from last year, so the timing was perfect!

Then we went to visit a friend who has a blueberry farm! We all chatted and picked a bush clean, and came back with a bucket-full of delicious blueberries. 12 quarts! I cleaned some and put them in the freezer, and more went in the fridge, and then I mashed some up for jam.

This may have been the most work I did all day!

 Ah, the fruits of my labor – filling the pantry until next season!

_

Garden Update

On By stefrobrtsIn gardenLeave a comment

Well, it’s been a long cool summer here, with frequent cloudy days and surprise rain showers. That has led to a late planting window, followed by an invasion of slugs like I have never seen before. Every year I learn something new about gardening, and I think this year I learned to just relax and let it go, because whatever is going to happen is going to happen, and there’s only so much you can do when you’re fighting mother nature!

In the background you can see the neighbor’s humongous shop, still in progress! This view shows the stuff that’s doing most of the growing this year. Big healthy cucumber plants, and tomato plants, and some good sized herbs and onions.

This row is mostly onions and leeks, and a couple broccoli plants hanging in there. Mostly invasive grass and weeds I’ve been fighting all summer.

Big squash plant, but I’m having a hard time getting any squash off it because the slugs start munching on them before they are ready. I need to get out there and prune it back. In front you can see my very yellow parsley plant. I was puzzled, because just last week I went out and clipped some parsley off it for dinner, and I was really happy with how it looked. Looking closer, I see there are holes under it and some critter has clearly burrowed under it and killed it! Give me a break!

This row has two pickling cucumber plants, and a volunteer chives in the very front. I found a lot of cucumbers under those leaves, but I’ll save that for another post.

I stepped past the next two rows to shoot them from the other side, because those are my 7 tomato plants. They are pretty large, and seem to be growing fine, but they are loaded with green tomatoes. No telling if they’ll turn red (or yellow), but we’ll wait and see. I have a feeling I’ll be canning green tomato salsa again this year.

The only tomatoes turning ripe are these black cherry tomatoes, and only a few of them.

Although this isn’t garden, it’s my pasture, and it looks beautiful. We had a neighbor come spray it with WeedMaster this year to kill the invasive weeds, and it looks like it did the trick. Dave mowed it last week and found more grass growing where there used to be lots of weeds. They aren’t gone, but their numbers are down!

The hill looks really good. It usually is very scrubby and covered with daisy, but it looks very grassy now.

_

Pictures around town

On By stefrobrtsIn dave, theater1 Comment

Yesterday was a lovely sunny afternoon, and we were downtown so Dave could do a skit at the theater for an Art-Walk type event that was going on. I hung around the theater a bit, and then went over to the park in downtown Vancouver,WA (Esther Short Park) and took pictures around there.

My main goal was experimenting with my camera,  taking all my pictures in manual mode and playing with aperture and exposure times.

First we had to get into town, since we live way out in the boonies…

I’m not sure what this sign was for, but I liked the color!

This is the clocktower in the park. I was trying to get a picture of it with flowers in the foreground, and have good focus across the whole picture. I felt a little weird squatting behind a big flowerpot trying to make that happen, and I felt a little nervous because people kept looking at me funny.

The moon was up, but this was the best shot I could get. If I had been willing to climb into the bushes for a minute, I could have lined it up so it looked like the fish was eating it, but I decided I was attracting enough attention as it was.

Different angle on the tower…

I liked the texture of the pavement under this leaf

This is one of the tallest buildings in downtown Vancouver. It’s a home for low-income seniors. My uncle lives there. It was built specifically for that purpose, and those guys have the best view in town because it overlooks the river and the I5 bridge!

Back at the theater, I got this shot of one of the actors waiting to go onstage. High ISO, and a long exposure because it was so dim. I like the shot, even with a little motion blur.

The skit they were doing was a silly little thing full of puns and sight gags. It was about a 15 minute show, and they did it every half hour for 3 hours! It was like a little marathon! That’s my handsome hubby holding the paper up 🙂

Then came the curtain call. This was another tricky shot to get because of the low light. I have to say though, I’m much happier with the quality of picture this camera can do with high ISO settings. That’s a big difference between it and my old Powershot, which had terrible picture quality if you bumped up the ISO.

On the way home I played with long (3 second) exposures (I wasn’t driving), and discovered that if I took them as we passed under the intersection signals I got really cool rays of light. This was my favorite of that bunch.

So that was my fun afternoon with my camera. Every picture taken in Manual mode after carefully considering what settings I wanted to use based on the light, and what I was going for. It was a great learning experience! Of course I took about a hundred pictures, and these were my favorites. I’m so grateful for digital!
_

Dave

On By stefrobrtsIn dave1 Comment

Just a couple pics I snapped of Dave while we were at the theater yesterday

Dang, he looks good in a suit 🙂 For this picture I had to use a high ISO setting, and still had to wait until he was relatively still to avoid motion blurr. It was good practice taking pictures with manual settings and unusual lighting conditions.

He was wearing sunglasses for the skit he was in, so we were playing around with the down-lighting from the tracklights overhead in the waiting area. I liked this shot especially – how’d I get so lucky as to have a good lookin’ guy like that!?

_

Dogs & Cats

On By stefrobrtsIn mighty, navi2 Comments

Navi & Mighty, to be exact – my most co-operative models!

With my new understanding of exposure/aperture settings, I decided to set up the studio for a bit more practice. Navi was first up on the stool since she recalled getting lots of cookies there!

I WISH this shot had not been blurry – it would have been awesome!
Later I caught a few shots of Mighty on my desk. This gave me a chance to play with exposure, and since she doesn’t move much (unlike the dogs, who can’t hold still), I could do some longer exposures on her (since the room was dim) and still get sharp pictures.

I used f/4.2 on this one and focused on the eyes to make the face sharp and the paws and body soft.
_

Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson

On By stefrobrtsIn barclay, navi, pets2 Comments

After our discussion of depth of field last week, the lady who runs our photo club suggested we get a copy of Understanding Exposure, so I went right out and ordered one. It’s a fantastic book. Within the first 20 pages I at least doubled my knowledge of how the camera works. It is setup with lessons and exercises, so I was playing along with my camera, figuring out how the settings work as I went.

Barclay and Navi were hanging out with me in a shady part of the yard, making for some challenging shots, but the techniques in the book all made sense. The hardest part was getting the dogs to sit still long enough to change the settings.

Barclay is a lot of help! Note the one ear turned in my direction. He’s an expert at ignoring me!

Pretty Navi!
After dark I headed out to take some night pictures. Last time I used a higher f-stop, thinking that would be correct for depth of field, but it didn’t gather enough light to get any results. My camera is limited to a 30 second exposure. So this time I used the smallest possible f-stop, which leaves the aperture wide open, and that did much better.

This is the constellation Lyra – with the brightest star in the summer sky.

This is part of Pegasus (he’s upside down from this angle – the big quare is his body). The label points to the fuzzy blob that is the Andromeda Galaxy.

Here’s a closeup of that section

And this is Cassiopeia Rising behind the tree in the backyard. This is one of my favorite constellations because it’s so bright, I could easily find it even from the light polluted city where I grew up!

So I was pretty happy with my results for my second night out with the new camera. There are a lot of techniques to use to get better shots of the night sky, many of which have to do with creative post-processing. I guess I’ll have to work on that next.

_

Roses – playing with focal length / aperture

On By stefrobrtsIn Uncategorized2 Comments

Our camera club assignment for this month is to try and build a better understanding of focal length, and using aperture to get the results we want in our photos. A better understanding of this would have helped my portrait photos last week!

Using my 28-80mm lens, I went out to take some pictures of a beautiful rose I spotted on the bush out in the dog run.

Wide shot in ‘auto’ mode – camera chose F9, lens at 28mm
 Zoomed in to 60mm, exposure: 1/4000, hand set f-stop at F4.8 – low as it would go. Just the central part of the flower is in focus, and the rear pedal is soft and has no detail
Still 60mm, exp: 1/800, changed f-stop to f8, regained some detail on the rear pedal, and the leaves in the background are more in focus

Still 60mm, exp: 1/400, upped f-stop to f25, more detail on rear pedals, and leaves behind are in focus. Because the f-stop is a larger number, the aperture (the opening in the lens) is smaller, so the picture is a little darker – less light was let in, even though the camera compensated by upping the exposure. But it can be brightened up in editing.

Brightened up using Picasa. If I had a tripod, I could set for a longer exposure at this same f-stop and brighten it without editing tools.
 Slightly different angle, zoomed in to 70mm, exp: 1/500, f18 to get detail on the rear pedals, brightened up in Picasa
_

The Flowers and the Bees

On By stefrobrtsIn Uncategorized1 Comment

I spent a bit of time outside this morning learning more about how my camera works, trying to do closeups of flowers and bees. Playing with the f-stops and exposures. – I have much to learn! My DSLR has so many buttons and modes and settings, it’s a challenge!

I think this was my best attempt at getting the bee in focus and letting the rest of the picture be soft.

 
Bees don’t hold still as long as I’d like!
Queen Anne’s Lace

Closeup on a daisy

Ran this one through a couple filters to B/W everything but the center and then blurr the pedals a bit.
_

Busy week

On By stefrobrtsIn health, weight loss1 Comment

I’ve been trying to take a dog or two to the park every day. While there I try to get in a little jogging on the trails. Since I have been doing most of my running on the treadmill, I need to work on strengthening muscles the treadmill misses, and the only way to do that is to run on the ground more. It’s slow going, but I have faith it will continue to improve.

I’ve also been playing tennis every other day with Dave, which is great fun. And I’ve been trying to do strength training every day. Sore abs! But it’s a good habit. Yesterday I got hit int he eye by a ball at tennis while playing with Dave and Sherry (Sake & Sitka’s mom). We were doubling up on Dave, and I went to pick up a ball and he didn’t notice and hit a ball over – what luck! So today I have a headache still and my eye is a little swollen and blurry. Much better than last night, so I’m sure it will be back to normal soon.

_