Today ‘the boys’ went to the State Fair.  Grandpa Sherrill is here to help out with some projects, so he came along as well. Jenny let us go without her (Pastor Wade joined us instead) and we had a good time.   The weather looked ominous, but it rained north of us, not at the Fair.  We had a beautiful 86, overcast, with a breeze.

Mark was devastated that the 'tomato train' scale set in the Ball State building wasn't running (it had been broken a couple of days ago) but we compensated with ice cream and a ride on the patrolling tractor wagons.  (Note the happy boys—Tractors AND Ice Cream!)

Adam fell asleep while sitting upright on the board bench and we headed home. We brought home Jenny an Elephant Ear so all is well.

Dad’s out for a visit which means we have new projects to do.  First on the list is updating our shed.  I’m not sure on the age of the shed, but the house and porch are 30+ years old.  From the state of the shingles, it may be the shed dates from that era as well.

Shed:

Shingles:

We’re going to replace the shingles, paint, and then clean/organize the interior.  A squirrel thinks that our shed is really a granary (and a nice one at that!) so we need to fix some squirrel damage.

The interior holds a couple of purchases of hardwood lumber for woodworking projects that have been on hold for a while.  Two work benches help ‘organize’ the space and various shed implements occupy space as well.  Because the lumber takes up 2/3rds of the floor width (and the workbench covers the remainder) the other implements have no place to go.  In my life, when things don’t have a place, then they look like this:

It’s great to have Dad out for a visit.  It’s even better that he insists on doing projects while he’s here.

Back in March, I posted Mark saying the Lord’s Prayer.  Well, on the same evening, Adam said the prayer as well, but I didn’t post the video.  I’m finally getting around to sharing Adam saying the Lord’s Prayer.

Whether he learned it from school or his brother (I foolishly thought maybe he was too young!), Adam now knows the Lord's Prayer.

Adam’s new trick (they qualify as tricks as saying extra prayers falls under ‘stalling technique’ for bedtime) is to ask for ‘Mazing Grace (and then ‘Diffrent ‘Mazing Grace when he’d like another verse, and another, and another).

The boys have been really good the past few days.  Jenny worked the Saturday and Sunday of the 4th of July weekend and the boys were great.  Yesterday (Monday) both boys got through the day without a fight at all.  We rewarded them with a Tonka cement mixer that Jenny had gotten a great deal on at a second-hand store (without a good gift-giving occasion in sight!).

Having two great boys delights me.  A fantastic wife makes a pretty good setup, too…It’s time to be ‘thankful for our daily bread’ for sure.

Today I interrupted my lawn mowing to capture some macro images of a lilly in our back yard.  It had been raining earlier so a few droplets of water sat on the petals.

This month I have been digging into macro photography techniques and snapping some images.  Unfortunately, most of the advice centers around using a tripod, something that I'm resistant to, as it doesn't match my more casual shooting style.  Since I was at home today and saw this image, I decided to get out the tripod and see how much difference a still camera makes in taking an image.

In the end, I found the tripod helps quite a bit.  Like a lot of things in photography, under otherwise perfect conditions, you can get by with

• fewer megapixels
• a cheap lens
• camera shake
• focus problems

etcetera, but in less-than-perfect conditions, any of the above start to combine and trash your images.  Today I was able to take a few good images hand held (such as the image above), but took even more successful images with the tripod.

I'm shooting with the original Canon Digital Rebel (EOS 300D) and these images were captured with a very cheap Sigma 70-300mm 1:4-5.6 DG zoom/macro lens.

The first image (above) was taken with ISO 400, f/9.0, 1/160s, 200mm focal length, manual macro focusing. I used the smaller aperture to get a deeper depth of field which then forced a higher ISO setting (especially since I was hand holding).  The nearest and furthest petals are losing sharpness which pleases me that I got the depth of field pretty close.  I lack experience judging this type of photo, so I'm not sure whether the loss of sharpness is a foul or if it helps direct the eye towards the center.  I don't know the classic answer, but I like the effect and it captured what I was trying to achieve.

The next image (just to the right) is one of the last ones I captured.  At this point I'm using the tripod which allowed me to use a longer shutter speed (and thus a less noisy ISO setting).  ISO 100, f/8.0, 1/80s, 200mm (320mm equivalent) macro focusing.  The stamens are in sharp focus, but the pistol (right 20% of picture) is out of focus.  The contrast of the petals and the green background pleases me.  One challenge for this image was capturing it while the flower moved in a light breeze.  I think 1/80s was enough to stop that motion, but if it had been combined with any camera/lens movement, I would have lost the sharp focus.

The final image I'll note comes from the middle of the shoot. (Ha! I'm avoiding mowing the lawn by taking pictures and I call it a 'shoot'!)  In this image, the entire flower is in focus, but nearby elements (the buds behind) are in soft focus.  The Bokeh effect in the background adds a pleasing sense of depth and an impressionist feel.  I used ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/100s, 133mm to shoot the shot (not macro).  Due to a longer distance from the subject, a larger aperture still keeps the flower in focus.

By actually getting out and shooting, I've learned several things.  Some of these reinforce information from the text I've been reading, other items relate to my limited budget and consumer-grade equipment.  For all of the images I took today, I had to manually set exposure.  I'm not sure why my camera body isn't setting exposure correctly, but it is producing  dreadfully underexposed images (almost black).  By setting both focus and exposure manually, I got better reinforcement about metering and didn't use the internal meter as a crutch.  Here are some other lessons:

• Don't hesitate to take a shot.  Even if the shot fails, you'll have learned something; on the other hand, it may be your best shot of the day.
• Give yourself the best chance to get a good image.  That means getting the best equipment and using all available techniques.  For me, I'm lucky to have a macro-focusing lens at all, so I need to do a better job at keeping my tripod handy (but if the shot won't wait for the setup time, take the shot!)
• Cheap lenses work best a f/8.0 (most/all lenses work best there, the better lenses continue to work well further from f/8.0).  Do your best to balance your ISO, shutter speed, and aperture to balance the noise, shake/blur, and distortion.  A mistake in one area (like shake) can ruin an image.
• Take a shot that you know will work, and take another that's on the edge of your working envelope.  Take one shot with ISO 400 (or even higher), even though you know it will add some noise and you'll loose some saturation and sharpness.  If you only take the shot at ISO 100, you may get home to find that what looked sharp on the LCD is actually very blurry and you lost the shot entirely.  Better to have two shots (at least) that both work (and one that's stunning) than to have one with great color that you can't use because it isn't sharp.

If you're a pro, you'll already know whether the shot is going to work or not, so you don't have to guess, and you've less to learn from making a bad exposure.  You can identify a pro because they just take a few shots, but they know the are all good images (perhaps not usable, but good and worth taking).  An element of hoping for good exposures remains part of my workflow.

A couple of weeks ago, Mark asked to say the Lord’s Prayer after our family prayer.  Surprised, I agreed and Adam, Mark, and I said the prayer.  Not having heard Mark do this before, I was stunned!  He had heard the Men’s Saturday Bible study group pray the Lord’s Prayer, but we hadn’t been working on it.  Perhaps this is something that happens at chapel for preschool.

Tomorrow I’ll post what Mark (and preschool, too, I suppose) has taught Adam.

P.S. This is the first time I’ve used YouTube for embedding video.  Let me know what you think.

The Thief recently posted his answers for the Name Game.  This list required the amount of brain power that I have available (low) and looked like I could finish it in one sitting.  I love my Star Wars name (because you never leave your 8th grade humor behind) and Soap Opera Name.

1.YOUR REAL NAME:
Timothy Paul Sherrill

2.WITNESS PROTECTION NAME:(father and mothers' middle names)
Timothy Julie (Like that doesn’t stick out…)

3.NASCAR NAME:(first name of your mother's dad, father's dad
Arnfinn Marvin (I’d get kicked out of pit lane)

4.STAR WARS NAME:(the first 3 letters of your last name, first 2 letters of your first name)
Sheti (Awesome!  I’m either related to the Bantha/Tauntaun or something a one left behind.)

5.DETECTIVE NAME:(favorite color, favorite animal)
Purple Monkey

6.SOAP OPERA NAME:(middle name, town where you were born)
Paul Pipestone (This is good…I can use this one.)

7.SUPERHERO NAME: (2nd fav color, fav drink, add "THE" to the beginning)
The Orange Chai

8.FLY NAME:(first 2 letters of 1st name, last 2 letters of your last name)
Tish (the sh sound stays handy)

9.STREET NAME:(fav ice cream flavor, fav cookie
French Vanilla Loaded Chocolate Chip

10. PORN NAME: (1st pet's name, street you grew up on)
Blackie Maple

11.YOUR GANGSTA NAME:(first 3 letters of last name plus izzle)
Sheizzle

13.YOUR IRAQI NAME:(2nd letter of your first name, 3rd letter of your last name, first two letters of your middle name, last two letters of your first name then last three letters of your last name):
Impaimill (It’s the newest pain reliever)

14.YOUR GOTH NAME:(black, and the name of one of your pets)
Black Newt

15. STRIPPER NAME: (name of your fav perfume/cologne, fav candy)
Polo Butterfinger

Yesterday I went to the Noblesville courthouse for the first time.  While the interior of the building amazed me (beautiful!), the proceedings did not.  The sentencing of a friend from church brought enough of his friends and family to fill the courtroom, but the evidence of support from the community seemed not to affect the judge at all.

Over the course of this trial (well more than a year), being a witness to how our justice system works has been a lesson showing how sheltered my life is.  While my view of the entire situation is sketchy, the prosecution's callus drive towards convictions and 'winning' at the expense of logic and reason toppled my engineering-centered world.  Rather than a well-balanced and reasoned impression of events, the prosecution shows its single-minded hunger for delivering statistics that impress an uncaring populace. 

The fact that their case lacked facts forced them into second gear, intimidation.  My personality lends itself towards building consensus and using positive-focused language.  My second gear is devoted to making decisions based on well-founded fact and risk minimization.  Perhaps our justice system must work the way that it does, but this was my first view of how direct and unwashed the system becomes once it gets its clutches into someone.

Unfortunately, right or wrong, my friend will be spending a few months (up to a year, really) in what could be called the department of incorrections.  When you read this, and later, should it occur to you again, please lift a prayer for my friend and his family.