Now that Vivi’s mobile and opinionated you’re going to be seeing a lot more of the back of her head.
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the fifteenth seven days
(let’s just accept that the eight, ninth, and tenth may never happen)
It’s like juggling. (I mean, not really because I can’t juggle.)
Maybe it’s like that Simon game, did you ever play that?
It had four different colored lights and sounds and it would give you a pattern, you’d have to follow the pattern back and every time you successfully did it would add a new light and sound to the pattern. You’d have it in your head, the little rhythm, the sounds, the lights. Beep beep boop beep bop boom boom beep!
But then something would happen, the phone would ring, someone would knock at the door, or you’d hear a big ‘thud’ from upstairs.
You’d miss the newest light – so you’d guess.
Beep beep boop beep bop boom boom beep – - boop?
You’d get it right! Phew. Game saved.
But then something else would happen, but not only would you miss the next light, you lost the pattern
Beep beep boop beep bop – - – boom? Boop? Beep?
Panic sets in.
Suddenly you don’t even remember how the pattern started, what color comes after green or if boop goes with red or yellow.
…..
Either you get the answer wrong or you take to long to answer and you hear a grating “BRRRRRG” sound.
…..
Game over.
You were so close to finishing, getting your highest score ever, and now you’re back to where you started with nothing to show for it but frazzled nerves and sweaty palms.
Something distracted me. The weather? Too many responsibilities? Looming deadlines? Unreachable goals? Inevitable failure? Chemical imbalance? Intimidation? Self esteem?
I’ve forgotten what comes next.
It’s sitting like a lump in my throat. It’s evident in my sweaty and shaky hands. It’s impossible to ignore my heavy pulse.
I’m not gone yet.
I’m teetering.
I’m employing every emergency tactic I can think of and I’m desperately trying to remember what comes next before it all times out.
(GIVEAWAY OVER! Winner has been contacted and will be announced soon!)
Hey there.
Ever dropped your phone? In water? Yeah, me neither (LIES.)
I can only assume that when you lose someone close to you, it’s pretty common to be blindsided by sadness on occasion.
There have been so many times that I have picked up my phone to call her only to realize she’s in a place without phone service.
I’m happy she’s there, I really am. But I miss her so much.
While I was in Utah I considered taking Vivi to her headstone but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. All that headstone marks is where her body is. The part I loved most, her spirit, is up in heaven and very much alive in my little baby who is named after her. Before she passed, I always stopped at a 24 hour Mexican place in downtown Salt Lake on my way to her house. I always ordered Cheryl a burrito with beans and rice, I always got the tacos. I would drive it up to her, smother her burrito in hot sauce, cut it into little pieces, she’d pop open a caffeine free diet Dr. Pepper, and we’d talk for hours about everything.
I stopped at our Mexican place one afternoon two weeks ago. It was my first time ordering just the tacos. It was also my first time turning left out of the drive-thru, not right.
Not right.
None of it felt right and the tacos tasted funny.
I know I’ll see her again, but sometimes I want to be selfish and have her back here with me so my tacos taste better and I don’t have to cry when I look at my phone.
sunday.
monday.
tuesday.
wednesday didn’t happen, here’s why.
thursday.
friday.
saturday.
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the fourteenth seven days
(let’s just accept that the eight, ninth, and tenth may never happen)
On Big Babble:
More about my side of the family and why they’re so great.
Addie doesn’t like candy. It’s strange (and somewhat wonderful.)
On Baby Babble:
More photos from Tayden’s birth and first day.
I found a 30 year old can of formula at my dad’s house, just how much has it changed?
My flight back to Utah with Vivi was…erm…difficult.
On Daddy Babble:
Supporting a wife with milk duds.
One of many times Addie lawyered Cody.
(Hey, why do you Babble so much? Answered here.)
Hey there, nice camera. What is that? A 60? A 600? What size card have you got in there? Have you figured out backlighting yet? Oh, you’re still shooting on the green square? That’s cool, I call the green square the Cody setting. He knows if he wants to use my camera and I’m not around to dial it around to that little hollow green box and snap away. But he also knows about the rule of thirds and not to cut people off at the ankles. I’m pretty impressed with what he’s learned so far.
He took this photo, he’s very proud of the non-ankle cutting and the thirds.
(50mm f/2.8 1/60 ISO 200)
He even held the camera straight, which is something I cannot do to save my life half the time.
This photo is kind of the perfect example of what I want to write about today, we’ll call it “What I’ve Learned From Taking Photos Every Single Day This Year” (Well, almost every single day, I can think of two that I missed entirely, today included. No biggie.) I have shot with my 50mm f/1.4 for probably 90% of the time this year. Every single photo from Paul’s birth, our trip to Florida as well as every photo I took in Utah last week (including Tayden’s birth) was taken with my 50mm. If you don’t have one, you should get one. A 50mm f/1.8 will run you about $100, if you can swing it, the f/1.4 has a much faster focus and a far more solid feel to it. If you can, take your camera into a camera shop, try them both out and give them a feel. If you like shooting big epic landscape photos I’ll refer you to my mom, that’s kind of her thing.
(50mm f/2.8 1/500 ISO 250)
So you have your 50mm and if you’re anything like me you’re firmly rooted in the belief that the lowest f/stop possible is a must. Sometimes it is. But most of the time it is not. One of the biggest problems I was having in January were these adorable photos of Vivi where nothing was sharp. They looked good enough on screen but if you really zoomed in they were blurry. I was shooting with the lowest possible f/stop and what that meant was I had a VERY narrow allowance of what was actually in focus before everything else dropped off into bokeh (out of focus.) If she moved the slightest bit I’d focus on her eyebrow, making her eyes out of focus. Or if I focused on one eye but she was at an angle the other eye was out of focus. It was infuriating. If you’re far back from your subject low f/stop isn’t such a problem, but up close and personal it matters. Rather than shooting at f/1.4 I bump it up to my new favorite, f/2.5 and turn up my ISO (usually around 400) to compensate for the loss of light with the low f/stop. Today’s cameras are so great that you can get up into pretty high ISO before noise ever becomes an issue.
(50mm f/2.5 1/800 ISO 320)
Suddenly all of Vivi’s eyeballs were in focus while the background stayed lovely and blurred (go ahead, click on ‘view all sizes’ and view it original. I DARE YOU.)
If you’re in the super bright sunlight and you shoot with Canon, keep your ISO at 100, Nikon 200. Adjust everything else accordingly. Nothing will give you better brighter colors right out of the camera as having your ISO as low as it can go for the conditions that you’re in. Perhaps there’s a better way to take pictures of a dog attacking a tennis ball, but my parents seemed pretty happy with the way I did it.
(50mm f/2.2 1/1000 ISO 800)
I bought myself a new camera in January. I didn’t make a very big deal out of it because I’m still convinced it’s the person running the camera that has more to do with how photos come out than the equipment used. I shot with a Canon 40D for years and after going to a Zack Arias workshop I decided to keep on going with my 40D until I outgrew it, Zack’s greatest bit of advice. I pushed that camera to its very limits, I know how everything works on it and I know its limits. The thing I outgrew the most was the ISO, the 40D can only make it to 1600 ISO, my new 7D can be pushed to 6400, meaning I can practically take pictures in pitch dark (not really, but it kind of feels like it.)
(50mm f/1.6 1/60 ISO 4000 (I know! SHUT UP FOUR THOUSAND!))
If you want to get better at taking pictures, learn how to use what you have, don’t just keep wishing, hoping and going into debt for the next latest and greatest camera thinking that will make you better, it won’t. It will just make you a mediocre fauxtographer with overpriced equipment. Moving from my 40D to my 7D was like moving from a 3 bedroom townhouse to a 5 bedroom home. I have plenty of room to grow, and at times it seems like a little too much.
(50mm f/4.0 1/320 ISO 200)
Learn to love your histogram. Speak its language. If your camera has one, use it. I use mine 80% of the time to tell me how I’m doing rather than relying on the preview. I used to use highlight alerts but that’s not the most reliable way to tell how good your exposure is. Here are a couple of articles that explain a histogram better than I can (seriously, I’ve tried. I’m awful at it unless you’re sitting right next to me.) this one does a pretty good overview of your in camera histogram while this one covers your post processing histogram.
Not every photo is going to be perfect every time, all that really matters in the end is that you’re there to take it and that you enjoy doing it.
(50mm f/2.8 1/800 ISO 100)
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Overwhelmed? Yeah. Me too. The good news? I just typed in ‘histogram’ over at Clickin’ Moms and got 7 pages of results, which sounds overwhelming, but each question can be narrowed down to post processing software used, camera used, level of skill and just who asked or answered what. I know a few of you have signed up (I get emails when you do! It’s so exciting to see who’s drinking the learning about my camera cocktail!) but if you haven’t…
Get a free trial with the code ‘MOOSHTRIAL’
Ready to jump in viewfinder first? Get 20% off with the code ‘MOOSH20′
Hope to see you over there!
Thanks to Clickin’ Moms for having me as an ambassador and providing me with a membership to the Clickin’ Moms forums. All links to Clickin’ Moms are affiliate.
‘Tis true.
Last week Cody began writing for Babble’s Dadding blog, if nothing else he’s about to get schooled in traffic goals, judgement and this crazy cool community that I’ve been entrenched in for years (he may also get an idea as to just how hard I work.) I’m excited you get to learn more about the man that has made me who I am and helped me make these two little girls we call ours.
Dads are funny creatures, tough on the outside, gooey on the inside…and oh how I love Addie and Vivi’s dad.
In his first post he introduces himself and tells you a bit more about himself.
In his second post he tells you what it’s like to be the dad to his best buddy Paddy Wagon.
Third he tells you about Vivi and how I threw my pregnancy test at him.
Fourth he gets kind of lawerly and discusses guns and their place in homes with small children.
Fifth up? He calls me lovely (and Paco Cheese Face.)
and last but not least, he may have kept the baby alive, but Addie didn’t bathe for a week.
