Name This Photograpy Style

Posted on by Jordan

I have said a number of times that Heather and I don’t necessarily like the same kind of photography.

For Heather, it’s easy to explain, she likes to take pictures of people.

I have struggled to define what it is that I enjoy with photography though. Over the weekend hunting in Nebraska however, I took a picture I am really happy with.

Not to say that I only want to take pictures of old or rustic things, but hopefully you get the idea? I just feel like I could look at that picture for a long time. It might be that it is a picture of ‘my home’ so I feel more affinity to it than most people would… all the same, I hope to learn to pick more of these kinds of thing out.

And to tie in the title of this post, anybody know the proper term for this? ‘landscape’ doesn’t sound right to me, but maybe it is…

at any rate, I am rather happy with the picture, and uploaded a full-quality version if you click through to gallery 🙂

(full-quality from our little pocked sized camera, the SLR didn’t get to come on my hunting trip)

-Jordan

The Big Hunt

Posted on by Jordan

As I mentioned, the weekend spent hunting was a lot of fun. The majority of the time I was sitting right here:

I kind of jammed the camera into some grass to try and give you prospective into the area I was hunting. It didn’t work all that well, and the pictures when I was actually looking at the camera came out blurry for some reason. Anyway, what you can kind of see is that I am setting above a canyon. What isn’t real clear is that I am sitting in a little niche under a tree and that just a few feet from where I am sitting the wall drops 40 feet straight down, and all the trees in the background are a lot bigger than maybe they appear.

Having set the scene, I will just skip to the part I got to retell over and over again…

I found the spot Saturday afternoon, after having decided my initial hide wasn’t giving me the visibility I needed, nor was the deer traffic as good as we had hoped. I was trying to be quiet, but alerted a deer to something being in the area when I slipped into the spot. I never got a good look at it, but I don’t think the deer really knew I was there ether… just casually moved away from that sound that didn’t seem quite right.

Then things were quiet for probably close to an hour. I thought I had a great idea of exactly where deer would enter and exit the canyon, and at what points I would be able to see them. Somehow a patch of deer colored fur was moving across the other rim of the canyon… and I was going to have a hard time getting turned to really look at it without making some noise. After I lost track of it, I got probably a little too free with craning my head around to try and find an angle to see down through the brush into this unexpected approach.

I must have shifted my entire body, although I don’t remember when, but I was squared up with the last known position of the soon to be discovered buck. He stepped into a spot where I had a clear line of sight, and I started bringing the rifle up without even thinking about it. All I remember is getting the scope view lined up and feeling like the horns took up the entire view! My reaction wasn’t what I expected, on the one hand I flipped the safety off and stabilized myself without having to think about it, but on the other hand my heart-rate went up by about 200 percent and I couldn’t control my breathing in that moment.

It didn’t end up mattering, because he didn’t stop walking and the window through the trees only gave a few seconds to soak all that in. Nothing indicated to me that he was spooked, but at the same time he didn’t come out on the trail farther up the canyon like it appeared he should have.

I was disappointed and relieved at that point. Obviously, I wanted to get a better look at the buck and a shot, but relieved that I wouldn’t have to try and take a shot with my heart pounding like that. I sat very still for the next 20 minutes doing little except trying to prepare myself to be relaxed if this happened again.

Three doe started working their way down the path towards the spot my elusive buck vanished. I took the opportunity to observe where the trail intersected good shooting lines. I felt pretty prepared, and just hoped maybe another buck would wander through.

The doe worked their way past the big blind spot the buck had vanished into and came out on the trail I had initially expected traffic to use. I decided it would be a good idea to practice holding the scope over a deer and doing the “deep breath, release slowly” thing to make sure I was being stable. The only problem was that doing that required me to drastically shift my body position.

The process of getting shifted around, made a little bit too much noise. Not enough to scare the doe off, but enough that they looked all around and started sniffing the air. I froze. They were cautious, but apparently figured things were ok, and stared to move again.

Then I saw movement back at the other end of the canyon, and it was moving out of the blind spot!

I managed to revert to my initial position real quickly, and without making much noise. Then the buck held up sniffing the ground perfectly centered in my last realistic shooting lane on the trail!

I heard the safety click off, and thought something like “GAAAAAAAH!!! this is too perfect, calm down….”

brought the cross-hairs into the center of his shoulder and back a little, let out a big breath in what was meant to be a slow fashion, but wound up being like trying to blow out candles 10 feet away and….

**boom**

I switched back to binoculars and scoured the area, finding…. nothing. It was kind of a long walk around to get to the spot he was standing… no blood, nothing.

In hindsight I am sure my trigger-pull was every bit as gentile as my breathing had been, but it was a really frustrating thing to have happen!

So, in conclusion, I learned that ‘Buck Fever’ is a very real thing.

/sigh

-Jordan

ps. The story of the buck in the picture I posted before isn’t interesting at all, but at least I was able to relax and put a round into the vitals of a buck.

Another Side Of Cooking

Posted on by Jordan

For the most part, when I post something I made on the blog, it is because it is ether a mildly out of the ordinary recipe, or perhaps I was just really happy with the appearance of whatever it was.

Over the past month or two, Heather and I have had the chance to help out with a homework center. Our connection is through our church, although the Des Moines Vineyard isn’t the sole sponsor of the program. Specifically, our connection has been to arrange food for the kids each Wednesday night.

Often we have been able to recruit volunteers to prepare a meal to bring, and all we have to do is coordinate who, when, and where. Other times we have needed to prepare the food ourselves. This brings us to the topic of this post, because cooking for 30+ people is a little different than cooking for just Heather and I.

The first thing I made was chili. I don’t have any pictures of that, but well most chili looks about the same. The noteworthy thing is just that the ‘big’ pot we have isn’t quite as large as I had thought when your trying for massive quantities. I didn’t have room for all the beans and veggies in the pot, but at least we had enough food for everyone to eat.

The second time we cooked, we tried meatloaf and scalloped potatoes. I should be clear, I do mean ‘we’. Often Heather and I find that we get in each others way when we are both trying to work in our little kitchen, so generally I just ask Heather to go find something else to do when I am wanting to try something new. In this case however I wanted every bit of help I could get, and Heather really came through! She peeled ten pounds of potatoes, and then sliced them all! The assembled product, ready to be cooked:

They look pretty good don’t they? What we probably should have known, is that they were going to turn a nasty grey color in the fridge overnight. To make matters worse, we didn’t even know what had happened until we were at the church the next night with just enough time to throw them into the oven and have them done in time for dinner. To make matters worse, we didn’t notice the yellowed note near the ancient ovens warning us that they ran cold until 30 minutes into the 50 minute cook time! In the end, they looked sad, tasted fine, and were only 20 minutes behind schedule. It was a little demoralizing, Heather felt almost guilty serving “those gross potatoes” to the youth. I thought they were good, but I wont pretend they didn’t look a little off.

Our third try was a little more straight forward, spaghetti. I would have to leave work a little early to have enough lead time to make it work, but at least I figured there wouldn’t be any surprises.  Then we got a call from one of the people who work with the youth, saying that they were expecting a lot of extra kids, so plan on around 50!

The church kitchen is well-stocked with huge pots and pans, so at least we weren’t going to run into the problem we had with the chili.

It might be hard to tell from that picture, but that pot making pasta has to hold at least seven gallons of water…  It was kind of surreal cooking on that scale. Oddly enough I can’t think of much to say about that process, except that I was kind of thrilled the entire time to be cooking on that scale. I didn’t ever get a headcount on the attendance, but the group managed to go through 6 pounds of pasta, 4 loves of bread, and roughly 4 gallons of sauce. I don’t think anybody went hungry, but we didn’t have any meaningful leftovers ether.

In conclusion, I have enjoyed some of the challenges feeding the homework center kids have presented, but if you have ever fed a big group like that before and have some great menu ideas we could probably use them!

-Jordan

Web Work

Posted on by Jordan

Wow, you blink and another week goes by.

So, what happened this week?

Heather’s parents came to visit. The occasion was the Huskers playing against Iowa State University. We only managed to obtain two tickets, as it turns out Husker fans suck up all the tickets far quicker than our planning could account for. That may have been ok though, as much as it pains me to say it, Heather is not a football fan. She would not have her moneys worth out of a ticket.

The game was… intense to put it gently, but in the end, the Huskers won it, if only by the smallest of margins.

Sunday afternoon Heather had the opportunity to take family pictures for a coworker. She was on cloud nine for hours, both during the actual picture taking, and the culling and cleanup stages on the pictures.

I would love to show off some of her work, but I don’t know that it is really proper to be throwing up pictures of other peoples kids here.

In less dramatic news, I played around with PHP and javascript to produce these. They are really rough, but I have grand plans for doing a super stripped down version of a gallery, after the program “Gallery” messed up my picture links. We shall see how long that motivation holds out 🙂

Up next week:

Nebraska Deer Season, and  The “Cake Boss” visits Des Moines. I will let you guess as to who is attending what event.

-Jordan

Scouting Thoughts

Posted on by Jordan

I wanted to wait a while after having finished the Scoutmaster training to let my thoughts settle in a bit before I wrote this post. I may have waited too long, and lost some of the wild enthusiasm I had before, but I am going to try and put something together none the less.

Even without owning a TV it has been impossible to miss the fact that we are in an election season. Obviously this election, like most elections, is important, and there are plenty of other places online that talk about why. I bring this up because I was captivated by the idea expressed at some point during the training that “it is easier to build a boy into a man than repair a man gone wrong” The exact words were more elegant than that… but you get the idea.

I don’t want to sound overly grandiose, or set expectations too high for the guys coming out of my troop, so I suppose I should scale that back in a little until I have some idea what day to day working with the troop is like.

As much as I thought I had nailed down in my head what I was going to say in this post it is becoming remarkably fuzzy…

First off, it was very refreshing to realize that the goal of Scouting is to let the boys develop character and maturity through being able to learn, and fail, in safe environment. I guess I should explain, in this context ‘safe’ basically means ‘nobody is going to die’. Not that anybody at the training wants to see a kid get hurt, but there was an expectation that when you turn a dozen 13-year old boys loose with pocket-knives, a few bad-aids may be needed before the day is done.

I somehow managed to go my entire time in scouting as a boy without realizing that the adults weren’t doing that much of the “leading,”   and never would have guessed that it was by design. If things are running properly, the scoutmaster isn’t suppose to do anything but act as an advisory for the senior patrol leader and the guys supporting him. I could be remembering an overly-ideal troop setup, and I haven’t been with my new troop long enough to know how practical that ideal is, but I know it is a real goal of my local troop. So much a goal, that one of the longer standing Scoutmasters is best known for his ability to smoothly guide overly-helpful parents away from the boys so they can continue to struggle putting up a tent!

I hope this doesn’t make me sound like I am excited to watch a bunch of kids get hurt or something. I am just really happy to know that Scouts aren’t overly protective or so scared of a lawsuit that they wrap everything in foam.

I know that my first real job with the troop will be as an assistant patrol advisory for one of the newer patrols. This means that another Scoutmaster-trained parent will be the primary guy trying to gently steer them towards earning their next rank, and I will fill in behind him. It also means I will be working with 13-year old boys… my dreams of building better citizens for tomorrow may not last long against the booger-jokes and giggling, but at least I can try right? 🙂

-Jordan

A Payoff

Posted on by Jordan

As many of you know, Heather and I ended up being rather enthusiastic fans of Dave Ramsey program.

A sort of honesty-check moment came back in January, when we wanted to purchase a new camera. Rather than just boot the budget out for a month and buy the camera we started setting aside some money each month.

This past weekend we finally hit the threshold of “enough saved” plus “feeling like we might actually take advantage of the improved features” and decided to buy.

Heather and I are now the proud owners of a Canon Rebel Ti.

I hit the research fairly hard for a few days beforehand, and if your interested, dpreview is an amazing resource. What I found was, in short: It is really hard to go wrong, and really easy to get overwhelmed by information and choices.

I ended up aggressively steering Heather towards this camera primarily because the photography club we joined is made of largely of Canon fans. I figured there would be more people able to help explain the camera, and some of it’s features. We haven’t really figured out how to learn something together yet, so I am trying to leave as many options open for each of us to figure stuff out as possible.

My expectation was, that given the release of the Rebel T2i we would be able to find the Ti fairly cheap. Online it seems everyone else had the same idea, and I wasn’t finding much in the way of a deal. Saturday we made a trip over to the local photography shop with the idea that we should probably hold the camera a few times before we jumped in with both feet. Not only did we like the camera, but they had a rather attractive instant-rebate + second lens deal, making them more attractive than Amazon. The idea of having the rest of the weekend to play with the camera wasn’t too shabby ether 🙂

Having played with the camera for a day or two now, I cannot say enough good things about it. The only bad thing is it is so easy to squeeze off picture after picture (up to three a second!) we managed to create a huge pile of pictures that so far haven’t been sorted through.

The other downside is, as much as we thought we were starting understand photography better, it takes about two seconds to drown in menu options that we don’t understand. The wonderful counterpoint to that is simply that we don’t have to care, throwing the camera into “auto-mode” and shooting turns out better results than we probably deserve to be getting.

I feel a little bad not posing a picture of one of us, but we kind of looked like bums all weekend (or at least the times we had the camera in tow), so you will have to be content with a picture of my other weekend project:

I am rather proud of that too 🙂

-Jordan

Camp Out Debreif, Physical Report

Posted on by Jordan

I haven’t even started writing this post and I am already afraid I am going to beat scouting to death as a blog topic in the next few weeks. I guess that is the downside to my using this blog as a place to post whatever comes to mind… anyway bear with me, it isn’t the only thing Heather and I are up to! 🙂

In an attempt to keep this brief and focused, I am just going to talk about the practical side of the training weekend, and leave my reflections on it for a later date.

First off, as you might have guessed, not all of my camping gear was 100% ready to go after having been packed away for the past ten years.

Things that weren’t perfect:

  • The elastic in my tent poles — completely dead!
  • My cold-weather sleeping bag
  • ‘flint and steel’ kit — not really flint, whatever it was made out of was corroded beyond use
  • Sleeping mat — still functional, but they make much nicer ones now
  • Flashlight — got me through the weekend, but the switch tried to die a few times
  • First-aid kit — didn’t need it, but the bandages are looking a little… crispy at this point

Things I apparently don’t own anymore:

  • Mess kit
  • Hatchet — not that I need one at this point, but I used to have one I though
  • Camp shovel
  • Extra rope

Last but not least, things that worked just fine:

  • My tent — ignoring the pole issue
  • Rain gear — didn’t need it, but still appears to be in great shape
  • My hat

Beyond equipment, I felt like the majority of my ‘scout-craft’  type skills weren’t too rusty. I still remembered most of the knots, and I don’t have any doubt as to my abilities to light a fire. First-aid is one I should re-visit I am sure, and the compass driven navigation course was more challenging than it should have been. I am really looking forward to getting more opportunities to hone all of this stuff.

Going back to equipment, I ended up feeling really sheepish when I unpacked my sleeping bag and said “oh yeah, I am still allergic to down, and this is a down bag!” The other detail I had forgotten about until the next day, when during a session they pointed out that cold-weather bags shouldn’t be stored in their compression bags long-term. I have a feeling a decade counts as long-term, and it might explain why the insulation wasn’t performing as well as I might have hoped. Luckily it wasn’t really that cold.

Most of the other things I had at least weren’t surprises; they were just products of my not finding the time before the trip to replace/restock/re-evaluate them. It’s really kind of exciting, although given the time of year most of my “shopping” probably going to be constrained to appending items onto a wish-list. At least I don’t anticipate anther camping trip for a few months now.

If that was too much naval gazing, I can at least offer you a link to the pictures I took

-Jordan

Long Weekend, Short Post

Posted on by Jordan

Hey there!

I really have so much to say about scouts right now, and I am really excited after having just completed an entire weekend devoted to scoutmaster training.

Sadly, I am really tired and haven’t even dealt with all my gear yet.

Hopefully I can find time to pull together my thoughts enough to have a coherent post about how scouting looks from this side of graduation. Worst case you will end up with a rambling info-dump, but the faster I wrap up this post the better our chances of avoiding that are.

-Jordan