Roundup for the Week

The Boy and Snippet (and, of course, Mason) spent last weekend and the first couple days of the week with us. To make a long story short, Snippet had strep, Mason had gas cramps, and neither one of them were doing very well. Pitching in is what extended families do, and so we pitched. Mason usually gets quiet (but curious) when I walk him around, so I did a fair amount of that trying to get him settled down. His issues turned out to be related to some cheap formula; switching that took care of him. Some antibiotics took care of Snippet’s. So they left Wednesday morning, and I managed to sleep through the night both Wednesday and Thursday. Seeing as I hadn’t done that in the weeks prior to Mason’s visit, it certainly wasn’t all his fault.

Mrs. Fetched’s knee is mending, far more slowly than she’d like. She’s gone down to one crutch, but can drive… us all crazy. :-) Actually, she’s mostly been pretty good about the whole situation.

The camera goodies I ordered a couple weeks ago arrived last week. I put the flash to work right away — you’ll notice the lack of background shadows in the above photo, compared to the one you’ll see following the link, bouncing the flash off the ceiling is really helpful — but the telephoto zoom had to wait a while to get a little testing. As I expected, it’s a great lens for outdoor work. Between the 28-135mm zoom that came with the camera for general use, the f/1.8 50mm lens for indoor venues, and the new one for long shots, that pretty much covers the bases. Having image stabilization in the lens would have been nice, but that adds nearly $400 to the price and I already have a monopod. The monopod should help with bug shots; once I’m in place — about 8 feet away — I can wait for them to land and not bother them much. (I chased a bee around and ended up with a lot of motion blur, bummer.)

But if your subject is holding still, it’s not difficult to reach out and grab it with this lens — I expect it will come in very handy for sports and candid shots outside:



Larger subjects… well, let’s just say this isn’t an architectural lens unless you have a lot of space. I was standing about 50 yards away for these… it gives you an idea of what the extremes are:



OK… you know I wasn’t going to let you get away with only one Mason pic all week, right?



If something interesting happens this weekend, I’ll post… otherwise, Monday morning brings Episode 3 of White Pickups… and the story itself is going to pick up a little as well.