Mad Times

Our mayor saw me taking this picture and came over to see what on earth I was doing taking a picture of the ground in the middle of a busy intersection.

Nathan is 1!, originally uploaded by Jeff Youngstrom.

Can hardly believe that it’s been a whole year since my nephew Nathan came on the scene. My dad took this great picture.

Theo sitting on the paper one of his Christmas presents came wrapped in. Thanks, Grandma.

The power went out early Friday morning and it’s still out. This was taken in the early hours of the outage when the house was still pretty warm. It’s down in the mid-40s (F) now. I’m writing from my dear sister-in-law’s house where there’s light and heat and (most importantly) wireless internet.

This is probably the single most complex lost glove photo I’ve ever taken. It was too dark to get anything hand-held that didn’t make the background all zig-zaggy, so I put the camera on my little folding tripod that I carry everywhere and hardly ever use. The framing I wanted didn’t put the glove in the focus sweet spot so I had to tilt the camera and tripod down to get a focus lock then put it back with the button half-pressed before doing the full press to take the picture. But it was too dark to get a focus lock so with my other hand I shone my green Inova LED flashlight on the glove while doing the half-press. Clicking the full press was enough to blur the background too, so I set the self timer to make it wait before snapping the final picture. And I used the night scene mode to get a long exposure of the background. Whee!

My bike is actually right in the center of this shot, but I cleverly camouflaged it by strapping our Christmas tree to it before taking the picture.

At Gilman Village outside Lilypad Books

From December 11

From December 8