1) scrub the blackened bottom of cookie sheets.

me: james, commere. my hands are all wet. bring the camera.
james: (takes it all in with a glance)
me: this is the before.
james: i think the after is going to be a failure.

me: yeah, probably. no way this is getting unblackened.

…

me: IT’S A CHRISTMAS AN SOS PAD MIRACLE!

-amy does wear dishwashing gloves.? ya wanna make somethin of it, punk?

Trying out my colored contacts (sapphire).

they’ve been sitting in my medicine cabinet for a year now.

i wonder why i always end up making this face if a camera points at me long enough. I think it’s a severe Calvin and Hobbes influence.

they still don’t work right on my eyeballs. i think they don’t fit properly. every time i blink, they move around and then settle. very batty. anyway, i took them off, dropped them in the trash.

i like my own green eyes better anyhow 🙂

I just need some NEW CONTACTS so they don’t fall out from yuckiness!

-amy thinks this is going to be a lazy, photo-posting blog week

Jocelyn just finished up a round of antibiotics last Monday, and now she is sick again. Started Friday with super goopy (pink-eye-y) eyes. We got some drops for her, the doctor saw her Monday morning and said, yup, she has a cold.

She is intolerant to milk, and she will get all snotty and sick when she’s had milk. Not just any dairy, but MILK. If the milk protein has been altered in some way, then she’s good with it. Cheeses are all ok, except american, which let’s face it, is basically congealed milk, dishes that have milk that have been cooked in the oven are ok (like bread. cookies. baked mac and cheese.) but stove top cream sauces are out. I guess it doesn’t break down that milk protein enough for her system to not go after it.

So James thinks I’m crazy, but I have been thinking about what she’s eating (as I always do whenever she gets a runny nose, FIND THE CULPRIT!) and one thing we’ve been doing is giving her M&Ms as a reward for various things. She let’s me blow her nose? She gets an M&M! She goes peepee on the potty? M&M time! She lets me put in her eye drops? Two M&Ms, one for each eye!

I recall at one time, like a year ago, I had chocolate in the “never ever give her” category. I don’t know why I changed my mind on it, but I did, and now I’m thinking that these M&Ms are the culprit. I can’t quite chalk it up to a normal cold when it happened so quickly after the round of antibiotics. Grrrr.

Ethan had this same intolerance and drank soy milk, but he outgrew it when he was about 18 months.

Jocelyn will be 3 in march. I’m starting to lose hope that she will outgrow it.

Grrrr.

Poor girl.

I have some very VERY exciting news.

No, it’s not the fact that Jocelyn is basically potty trained. (Although that is very exciting.)

No, it’s not the fact that yet ANOTHER cat in our household of 3 felines is peeing in places not occupied by litter. (Exciting, but not in the nice variety.)(she is at the vet building up a supply of urine in her bladder to be extracted and tested in the morning as we speak.)

While the above items are TRUE, they are not the very VERY exciting news.

I have figured out what camera lens Santa will be bringing me! Yay!

Perhaps if I had blogged about this search, you would feel the same sort of relief that I do. Nay, that my husband does. For no one can feel the relief that James feels now, after listening to me DECIDE, and then change my mind, and then lament on the beauty of the lenses out of my budget, then decide on another one, then decide no lens, a FLASH, a FLASH is where it’s at, and then just cry because I have no flipping idea what to get, and then FINALLY make up my mind on A LENS A GLORIOUS LENS!

That is the sort of relief that only James can feel. But just so you can get a better feel on that sort of relief, I’d like to go through what’s out there, and include links and what not so if there are any other photographers-in-learnin’ that would like to follow the links and learn along with me, they can do that. If you’re not interested, then I’ll see you later alligator, as Ethan says CONSTANTLY.

I have had the aid of my brother Joseph, who is a great photographer. So great, that I woudn’t let him enjoy my wedding, but instead made him shoot it for me, for free (yay me!). He’s been a great source of info for me and he didn’t laugh at my dumb questions. (at least, not out loud).

First of all, I have a Canon 30D with the kit lens, which is the Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 II. We purchased this baby when it first came out, thus blowing our wad, and having no more moolah on a better lens. We knew that the lens it came with was pretty much crap, but it’s not like we’re all that stellar photographers (YET) anyway, so it’s been a good lens to learn and experiment with. With Christmas around the corner, we decided that it’s a good time for new lens. YAY!

Before I get into this, I want to state that most of the sites I’ll be linking refer to both Canon and Nikon cameras/lenses. Since I’m in the market for a Canon mount lens, I focused on Canon. Pretty much everything I’ve read suggests that both Canon and Nikon are quality, and neither are really “better” than the other. The sites all have Nikon information as well.

I started off looking at this page here:

photo.net: Building a digital SLR system
http://photo.net/equipment/building-a-digital-slr-system/
written by Philip Greenspun, updated 9/2006

The first very important tidbit I learned, was exactly what the difference was between the different flavors of digital cameras. You’d think I would know this, but I didn’t. I knew that SLR meant that the lens came off the front, but that is about all I knew. I learned that the three basic SLR digital cameras fall into these categories: small lenses, small sensor; big lenses, small sensor; and big lenses, big sensor. I knew my dad’s Canon 5D was a lot more expensive than my 30D, but now I know it’s because it has a big sensor inside, while mine has a small sensor. The Canon 5D is the only camera (I beleive, anyway) that has a big sensor. Nikon digital SLRs all have a small sensor

This shed a bit of light on the whole different lenses / crop / x1.6(canon) / x1.5(nikon) stuff. I have heard this, but never really understood it. I still don’t REALLY understand it (but I’m closer than I was before) so I will quote Mr. Greenspun:

“Having a smaller sensor is like cutting the center out of a drugstore proof print. You don’t capture all the information on the left and right and top and bottom of the frame. It is as though you took the picture with a telephoto lens. The viewfinder has been adjusted so that what you see optically is what is captured in the digital file. If you’re coming from the film world you will need to do a mental adjustment. A 50mm normal perspective lens on a big lens/small sensor camera behaves like an 80mm telephoto lens on a film camera.”

With Canon lenses, the “-S” means that the lens is built for these small sensor cameras (ie: EF-S 18-55mm).
Nikon uses “DX” to denote this type of lens.

Even though these lenses are built specifically for small sensor cameras, you still have to do the math to determine their actual end result.

While you CAN use normal lenses on a small sensor body, you have to do the math to determine what the actual focal length is. However, if you were to use a lens specific to the small sensor camera (EF-S or Nikon’s DX), they wouldn’t work on a large sensor camera. Or rather, they would, but the edges of the photo would be blurred/black, because the lens does not go to the edges of the sensor.

Mr. Greenspun goes through the different camera bodies VERY briefly, and I skipped over most of it, because I already have my camera body. He then goes on to suggest that you start with a “normal” lens.

He defines normal as the same perspective as normal human vision, which would be about a 50mm lens. His reasoning was pretty sound to me, being that,

“The novice photographer who starts with a zoom lens typically uses it in lieu of backing up or stepping forward. An experienced photographer visualizes the scene first, chooses a focal length, then gets into the appropriate position to capture the scene with that focal length. It is much better to get a lens with a fixed focal length, learn to recognize scenes where that lens can be used effectively, and then add additional lenses once that focal length has been mastered. So even if you have the $1000+ to buy a high quality zoom and the muscles to lug it around it is probably a poor choice of first lens.”

Hi! My name is Amy, and I am Guilty As Charged! I’ve totally stood where I was and zoomed away, only moving my feet when I couldn’t get the shot I wanted at the end of the zoom. So seeing myself in that statement, I was on board with his suggestion of a prime focal lens.

I also learned about aperture. This stuff, I kind of already knew. The f/stop on a lens represents the aperture. there are steps between each aperture, called “stops”. The smaller numbers are good, and they actually mean it is a bigger aperture. I did not really understand this until my brother pointed out that the number is actually the bottom number of a fraction.

So while I knew that f/2 was actually a BIGGER aperture than f/4, it made a lot more sense to me when I realized that it is actually over 1, IE: 1/2 is much bigger than 1/4. It’s TWICE as big! This was where having a photo-geek brother paid off.

So why is bigger better? Aperture is basically how big the lens opens to let the light in to the sensor. If there is a lot of light, you can snap off a picture very quickly and it will be very sharp. So when someone says that an f/2.8 lens is very fast, you know that it is because of the amount of light it lets in by that big aperture. On the flip side, if the lens has an aperture of f/5.6, it is a smaller aperture and therefore is letting a lot less light in. That means that the shutter has to stay open LONGER in order to get the light, which means it takes longer for that shutter to snap, and is therefore a slower lens. A slower lens may be affected by camera shake, which results in blurriness. It means that if you’re operating in low light, unless you use a tripod, you’re going to need to fight some blurriness with a high ISO (faster speed, but more graininess in the photo).

If there was one thing my brother hammered into me, was get a fast lens. He discouraged anything over an f/4, and who was I to argue?

So after reading and rereading photo.net’s ‘building a system’ page, I started to wander off from the “get a prime, fixed length lens”. Sure. I could get a fixed lens, and learn how to frame a photo up right the first time.. but surely I’m good enough now that I can skip this and get a zoom, right?

I started looking around at wide angle lenses.

Joe immediately suggested the Tokina 12-24mm f/4. 12mm is a very wide angle indeed, even when you do the multiplication for the cropped sensor. He pointed me to this site, which has a wealth of information for me to soak in:

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/digital-wide-zooms/comparison.htm
Ken Rockwell: wide angle zoom comparison
Nikon users will love his site, as he uses (and adores) Nikon. He has a lot of articles on cameras, lenses, how to become a better photographer, etc.
In this comparison, he suggests getting the Nikon lens unless you want to be cheap, in which case get the Tokina. However, at the bottom of the review, he states (under the heading, “What About Canon?”):

“I’d buy the Canon 10-22mm lens in an instant if I had a Canon digital camera. The Canon 10 – 22 mm is better than any of these four lenses, including the Nikon.”

He has a full review for this Canon lens here:
http://www.kenrockwell.com/canon/1022.htm

The Canon 10-22mm was a bit out of my price range, and Joe still insisted that his Tokina (which is cheaper) had the better aperture with the maximum f/4 (the canon 10-22 goes from f/3.5-4.5).

So I was really struggling for which one to pick… when suddenly it didn’t matter anymore.. I was wondering why I wanted a wide angle in the first place. I like to think that I do take some good shots once in a while, but those bad shots? A wide angle lens just means that there will be MORE badness. A crappy photo will turn into WIDER crappiness. Is that REALLY what I want? Also, I wanted to fiddle more with shallow depth of field, which wide angle lenses don’t really do, by their inherent nature. They are for capturing more of the environment around your subject, not make it blurry.

Really.. I like wide angle shots, but generally, I’m taking pictures of my kids most of the time. I need a good portrait lens, really, which means a telephoto lens, with a zoom to be versatile.

(This is where James is bashing his skull in. Fickle fickle Amy. Hand On Forehead. Le Sigh.)

Telephoto means a long lens. At least with telephoto, there’s only 1 lens that really caught my eye.

70-200. Canon makes this lens in several versions. Let’s go from cheapest, to most expensive, shall we?

First I need to learn ya some more letters n’ stuff. Canon uses the following:

IS: Image Stabilization – this is found on longer lenses, as the longer focal length tends to magnify camera shake. Helps offset bigger (less light=longer shutter speeds=more camera shake exposed=blurrier) apertures. I have no idea how it does this. I like to think there’s a little man in there, holding things steady.
USM: ultra sonic motor. This is the auto focus motor. With it, it’s silent and quick. Without it, it’s not as silent or quick

L: this denotes that the lens is in Canon’s professional series. top quality stuff.

OK, now that we’ve got all that out of the way (these prices are all WITHOUT the current Canon rebates going this holiday season)…

Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L USM ($580) small (i say small, but f/4 really IS a very decent aperture) aperture
Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L IS USM ($1060) small aperture, but WITH image stabilization!
Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L USM ($1150) ooh! BIGGER aperture (remember smaller numbers are better/bigger really the bottom half of a fraction) but no image stabilization
Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM ($1700) OMG!small aperture AND image stabilization! Zounds!
The f/4s were out of the running. Sorry. I need the wide aperture. The f/4 with IS would help offset any blurriness, but if you’re going to spend a grand on a lens, then why not cough up another hundred bucks and get the f/2.8 w/out IS? And of course, there’s the holy grail of the lens, which of course, is the one I want, which would be the f/2.8 with IS. Which would be $1700. Guess what, that ain’t happening.

In all my reading over the last 2 weeks, there was a quote I heard, can’t remember where, or who it was, but roughly, “the lens is usually better than the photographer using it” (that’s me, hehe). I can’t think of truer words in regards to the thought of me spending 1700 on a lens. Way more than I need at this juncture, or even know what to do with. Remember Philip Greenspun saying, “So even if you have the $1000+ to buy a high quality zoom and the muscles to lug it around it is probably a poor choice of first lens.” Gulp. OK, yeah, so he’s talking about me.
So taking these things into account (hi, i’m still learning, and 1700 is out of my league) still, honestly, a telephoto zoom is probably the lens that I am going to use the most. I know I would like to get a wide angle zoom at some point, but I don’t think this is the time. Telephoto is what I need, and while this one is overkill, something like it is really what would suit me best at this time.

So, after moping around about my lack of two grand to drop on a super duper fancy lens, looking at the wide angles again, I went back to the original idea of getting a fixed focal length lens. I started looking around dpreview.com‘s forums and caught wind of the Canon 50mm f/1.8, which is a cheap, but still great lens at about 70 bucks (look at that super fast aperture!) I could get a lens, a fancy flash to bounce off walls and my my kids look less orangey and grainy (let’s face it. i work during the day. i take most of the kid photos in yucky light.) and even a new bag to top it off.

It all SOUNDED so good, but I knew it really wasn’t what I wanted. This was MY CHRISTMAS PRESENT DAMMIT. I could go buy a 70 dollar lens any old time of the year! I DON’T WANT A FLASH (right now)! I WANT A FANCY LENS!

So what to do, what to do. I lamented to my brother, who shot back, “Look into Sigma.”

And so I did.

And I found this baby: Sigma 50-150mm F/2.8 APO EX DC HSM for about $670.

f/2.8! yay! 50-150! if we do our math for my cropped sensor, that is actually about 80-240! yay!

All those letters behind the lens stuff mean something too! yay! I can’t remember what though, and I’m too lazy at the end of this long assed post to go look.

I did go searching from some reviews or feedback on this lens, and I didn’t find anything on sites, but I did find several mentions of it on the dpreview.com forums, all positive.

And so, I am a giddy schoolgirl who will be setting out milk and cookies for Santa to make sure he doesn’t pinch it for himself.

So I am happy. I learned soooooo much in this experience of trying to find the right lens for me. All about aperture, and big sensors and little sensors and lenses, and image stabilization and ultra sonicy goodness that I’m going to go lay down and dream about nice, soft bokeh.

If you are still reading this… Hoorah! I will send you a candy cane as a reward. Just you email me and see if I don’t.

-amy comes right down santa clause lane.

MY BOY, PSYCHO KILLER (QUEST-QUE C’EST, FUH-FUH-FUH FUH FUH-FUH-FUH FUH FUH FAR BETTER*)

Ethan has been learning his alphabet in pre-school this year. He learned it in pre-school previous years, but this year, the year before kindergarten, they are learning how to print as well and he is really getting into it.

He often comes home and wants to write his name, my name, Jocelyn’s name, daddy’s name, and other assorted words that he likes. Sometimes after he writes the word, he’ll take his scissors and carefully cut the word out and put it on the fridge (our home art gallery).

One day, he came home and said, “How do you write blood?”

“Blood? Why do you want to write blood?”

“Because my friend Palmer got hurt in school. He was bleeding. So I want to write blood, and then give it to him.”

“Ok.”

I spelled it out for him, and true to form, he cut it out with his pair of scissors.

I was a bit worried about my son taking a small piece of paper with “BLOOD” printed on it to school and handing it to one of the kids. It is a bit psycho killerish, wouldn’t you say?

Luckily for me, he put it on the fridge and had forgotten his plans for it by the next day. I don’t need to fear parent-teacher conferences on just why my son handed a small piece of paper with the word ‘BLOOD’ on it to his classmate.

* Run run run run run run awaaaaaaaaay
I feel better now. Don’t you? It’s like leaving ‘shave and a hair cut’ without the ‘TWO BITS!’ on the end. You just can’t do it. Oh David Byrne, you can burn my house down anytime.

JOCELYN THE SMARTIE PATARTY

Monday, on the way home:

me: “So what letter did you start this week?”
e: “I!”
me: “Really! ‘I’! What sound does the letter ‘I’ make?”
Jocelyn: “eeh! eeh! eeh!” (it’s very hard to ‘spell’ the sound ‘i’ makes. pretend i spelt it right)
me: “THAT’S RIGHT JOCELYN!!”

ETHAN IS ALSO VERY SMART

me: So what words start with ‘i’?
e: ice!
me: hmmmm…. igloo. if. is.
e: THAT’S WHAT I SAID! IN MY CLASS! IS!
me: totally rad!

James later told me that his teacher was VERY impressed that he thought of ‘is’ as an ‘i’ word.

ETHAN AND JOCELYN ARE BOTH CUTE

Last night was my office’ holiday party. Yes. On a Thursday. And there was not a fully open bar (wine, beer and soft drinks only). On a Thursday. And it involved speeches that were overly long and invoked everything from our grandchildren working at our company to how someday we’ll be able to see a building with our company’s name on it from 66, or the toll road, or near DC. The glaring fact that our building ALREADY had our OLD company’s logo/name on it didn’t seem to phase him. The orator kept going on about how our efforts will make or break our parent company, and our work is what will sink or swim this company. It just made me want to holler, “MUTINY! WHO’S WITH ME? TOGETHER, WE CAN BRING THIS PLACE DOWN!” while swinging a sword and carving the place up.

The whole overly long speech situation gave me the giggles and everyone kept nudging each other to whisper smart ass comments to each other in a way that somehow made me feel like I was in church, and my mother was goign to smack me upside the head at any moment unless I started to behave and pay attention already. They really needed to offer us hard liquor to get through that speech.

So, along with the being on thursday, no fake gambling, no hard liquor, feeling like I was sitting in church for a good 20 minutes, sadly there was no dancing boob girl.Oh wait, this was supposed to be about Ethan and Jocelyn wasn’t it? Sorry I had to lament the fact taht there was no vodka, and no dancing boob girl. Wah. Still though, the folks I work with are a lot of fun, and we had a good time just talking and laughing. The food was good too.

ANYWAY. KIDS. CUTENESS. CARRY ON.

BEFORE the party, I had to get the kids, get the sitter, get the cat, get us all home, get ready to go, and then go. After I picked up the sitter, Ethan said to her, “I haven’t drawed you any pictures yet. But I will make you one when we get home.”

(AWWWWWWWWWW!)

At one point I said, narrating our events, “Now we will go get Sitter!”
Jocelyn: “At our house?”
me: “No, we will pick her up at her house, and take her to our house.”
jocelyn: “We will get SITTER at HER house! And then we will get LINDA! And they will come to OUR house! And WE will PLAY!”

Linda has been over to our house a few times now, and every now and then, Jocelyn will declare that she is coming over, totally out of the blue. This was one of those times. It was cute.

THE CROSSDRESSER

Jocelyn and Ethan’s classrooms each have a corner of dress-up clothes with a variety of different things. One time last year I arrived at his classroom to pick him up and he was wearing a dress-up dress, complete with heels, prancing around the room happy as a clam. The really cute part was at least 2 other boys were complaining that it was THEIR TURN ALREADY, and when Ethan saw me, he grinned like his face was going to split open, and hollered, “LOOK MOM! I’M A GIRL!”

So I knew what he meant, when on the way home one day, Ethan declared proudly:

“I was a GIRL today!”

me: “Awesome!”

-amy is researching for santa. wide angle lens? long zoom lens? fixed length? flash? oh, santa, your job is HARD.

Hard to beleive my baby is so big. Seems like this was only yesterday:

OK, just a few quick things.

First of all. LOOKEE LOOK LOOK! I DID find a tweezer!

Actually, I didn’t, but a nice lady named Marcia did some business with some wax, and now I look PHABULOUS! OK. Maybe me not so much, but MY EYEBROWS. THEY LOOK PHABULOUS!

Take a look at the before.

See? MUCH BETTER. OK. Enough about my eyebrows.
Second of all: Would all you people who decide to go christmas shopping first thing and therefore are crowding my commute with more cars that one would believe possible PLEASE JUST WAIT AN HOUR AND THEN GO?

You have my thanks.

Third: POKER.

I have been informed at at this evening’s holiday party held by my husband’s company… there will be poker. Fake money, but poker none the less. It makes me wish we hadn’t gone with the school’s “Parent’s night out! But pick their asses up by 11.” and gone with the babysitter who’s mother doesn’t mind if we bring her home around 1am. We will probably have to leave all the open bar and fake gambling around 10:15 in order to get the kids in time.

Still. POKER! It’s been so long I’m salivating. We need to have a poker night. Are you in? Not YOU, weird person who lives in another state, YOU, person who lives near me and actually has seen me in person before. I may even allow folks who haven’t seen me before. I still love you though, weird person. Really. Oh, go ahead and fly in, weird person, IT’S GONNA BE A POKER NIGHT!

Obviously, I need to get out more.

-amy checks her dosage.