Three Years

Posted on by Jordan

This post is a few days late… but that doesn’t change the fact that the date seems worth noting.

(Roughly) Three years ago:

 

We took a basic photography class on the actual day of our anniversary. Perhaps not the most romantic thing we could do, but we both learned a lot and enjoyed the class. I may expand on this later, but while I am thinking about it, it was somewhat embarrassing how little we knew about our camera. On the other hand, Heather is able to turn out amazing pictures just by letting the camera automatically configure it’s own settings, so maybe it wasn’t that much of a detriment.

Three years… A lot has changed in that time. I don’t think Heather and I could have ever guessed we would be where we are, doing what we are doing today three years ago. Makes thinking about the future seem both exciting, and futile as we aren’t going to see the interesting stuff coming anyway 🙂

To put it simply we have had a great three years, and can’t wait to find out what the next has in store 🙂

 

-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

A Weekend In Des Moines

Posted on by Jordan

As I think I mentioned before, this weekend was notable in that Heather and I didn’t have any plans for it.

I wouldn’t want anyone to think we were bored though!

Saturday was spent mostly cleaning… but after being on the go for so long the place really needed it.

I should back up though, Friday night we walked over to eat dinner and go to a movie at the mall we live next to. It only took us a year to actually get around to doing that! Heather and I often walk around the outside mall in the evenings when we want to go for a walk, and frequently we comment that we should take advantage of our location to walk to dinner and a movie, but ether we have been busy, or there haven’t been movies we wanted to see, or other things just kind of got in the way. Not anymore though! We finally walked over to a movie.

Ok then, back to Saturday… We had a wonderfully lazy morning, then cleaned like mad, then had a chance to go over to a friends house and meet a friend of theirs who is starting a mission of sorts in Mexico. It was neat to hear them talk about what they have seen in Mexico, and what they hope to be able to do there. It was also nice to just be together with friends from church in that kind of “around the kitchen table” setting and just enjoy being together.

While talking that night we found out about an annual event in Des Moines, called the “World Food Festival.” We were excited to learn that it was an all-weekend event, so decided to swing through after church Sunday.

As you can kind of see, it was a little crowded there, but there was no shortage of food to be had. Apparently we should have been writing down what we tried, because I can’t remember anymore… It seemed so obvious at the time, hmm…

Heather had some chicken fried rice, and a spring roll, I had a gyro, and then we sampled some Ethiopian rice dish, and some vaguely South-American vegetable pastry:

The pictures are from my phone, as somehow despite our intentions of learning more about photography, we managed to forget to bring a camera with us today. As you can start to see from the view behind me in the first picture, there were some interesting things we could have taken, if only we had planned ahead a little better. I suppose this let us enjoy the food more, although frankly the authentic spring roll, and the rice dish weren’t big hits with us.

I suppose it’s cheating to throw up this post with a few hours left in the day but I can all but assure we won’t be doing anything else blog-worthy today 🙂

-Jordan

P.S I just realized I haven’t ever put up a post about the Farmer’s Market here in Des Moines… despite having pictures and even some video from when my parents came to visit. I guess I should keep that in my idea list… In the meantime this festival isn’t at the same site, and was perhaps a quarter of the size of the farmers market, just to give prospective against something that I haven’t ever talked about directly.

Florida Wedding Pictures

Posted on by Jordan

Heather finished editing the pictures we brought back from Florida. I uploaded an album of the wedding related ones, it can be found: Here

Heather did a great job editing those. I am happy with a few of them, and I think careful cropping, and color adjustments did wonders for what you can see in the album. There are a handful of pictures that are disappointing because I know there was a much better picture three to five seconds earlier than the picture I took. Part of the problem was my camera being slow to boot up, and my not really managing the auto-focus. The major problem was just that I wasn’t really always in picture taking modes, so I didn’t have the camera out and ready, or I had it out but didn’t have it turned on.

Somewhere down the wish list for Heather and I is a much nicer camera. Although moving to something like an SLR style camera would take away a lot of the easy to carry, always with me aspects I like about my current compact camera. I suppose I shouldn’t worry too much, if we aren’t looking to get a camera for a while, it leaves time for all kinds of amazing advances in cameras! 🙂

-Jordan

Cool Camera Hacks

Posted on by Jordan

I don’t know if I really understand photography well enough to really take advantage of this, but I just saw an article about a firmware override you can run on most Cannon cameras to get access to a *LOT* more information.

The article

I suppose this would all take more homework than I am willing to do right now, but I have always been fascinated by the potential in hardware beyond what the stock OS offered. I admit I didn’t read this in depth, but it seems like the entire thing is running in-memory, so you could play with it and not risk trashing the factory firmware.

The “if it messes up you bricked your widget” factor is what has prevented me from playing with any sort of aftermarket software mods for my phone, despite my burning hatred for the stock Verizon software.

Anyway, if somebody else tries this let me know how it works out! I hope to look at it more soon.

-Jordan