Tara’s cold, which she acquired shortly after conception, has waxed and waned over the last month or so. I believe we have made three separate doctor visits on just this one cold, and went through two rounds of antibiotics. I’m pretty sure this last the one they gave us was the same stuff that was being sold on eBay during the anthrax scare. In any case, it seems to have had good effect; Tara unexpectedly slept through the night–something like twelve hours. When both our kids sleep through the night, even though it’s a good thing, it’s still shocking–like a stranger suddenly running up to you on the street and handing you a danish. Nice, but unexpected.

Work is looking up for some reason or another. As much as I enjoy writing, the fact that I am writing a “white paper” is making me think that in some small way, the terrorists have won. Still, it’s refreshing for a change, especially if I get back to writing code soon.

I’ve been finishing up some of the baby portraits from last week, and I’m really happy with them. Another hour or so of retouching any they’ll be ready to go, then I can get started on my own kid.

There was a period of a few months where both of the kids were sleeping well, not much was going on at work, and we were getting a fair amount of sleep. Of course, good sleep makes for boring blogging, and we have thus returned to our roots–not sleeping.

Tara is now on her zillionth ear infection and has been sleeping badly for weeks. Anna is doing no better, having night terrors on a regular basis. I’ve pulled a few near all-nighters in the last couple weeks, between the kids and my job and my other job. I woke up at 4:50am this morning so that I could fly to Portland, spend the day in meetings, and fly home. Lately, I could fall asleep at any given time of day, if I had the chance, and considering the staggering, ever-growing to-do list in front of me, I won’t have the chance any time soon.

On the upside, I plan to order another monolight for my photography. Jennifer says that I seem excited about my day job for the first time in a long while, although there’s a fair amount of trepidation mixed in. I shot a set of photos for our friend M.’s new baby, and they look awesome; M. has a great creative talent, and had some great ideas for photos, and I think I did a good job of helping to realize them. Though I’ve done the shooting, there’s still a fair amount of postprocessing that still needs to happen, and I have to restrain myself from doing it now because there is so much other stuff that I need to be doing in the short term. Hopefully I’ll be done a week or so from now and I’ll post one or two of the pics if she’s ok with it. Also, I’m going to borrow the props and try to shoot Tara the same way. I’m stoked.

If I was less tired, I would have a hard time falling asleep because of all the stress in my life right now, but if there’s one good thing about being tired, it’s that you can fall asleep at the drop of a hat.

I’m trying to remember all the stuff that went on this weekend, but I’m sure that I’m going to miss a bunch. To me, it seems like all the weekends end up that way; we bounce from thing to thing, and lots of good, interesting stuff happens that I really want to blog, but I never seem to have time.

Thursday night, I was to go out and play volleyball, but the gym was closed, so I ended up going straight to the bar where the crew would have gone after the game. Friday was Jen’s night to go play at the same gym, and while the it was open, there was nobody else there to play. She ended up going for a walk.

Saturday, the two of us went out for a nice dinner in Del Mar. After two individual nights out, it was really nice to have some time together. Jennifer has done a great job of setting up date nights each week for the last month or so.

Sunday, our friends M. & K. dropped off their son C. for the night, as they were scheduled to give birth to their second baby early this morning (Monday). We still haven’t heard how everything went. As Jen was putting the two four-year-olds to bed, I went out to meet my friend R. As I write this, I’m realizing just how many nights I’ve been out this week–very unusual for a married-with-children guy like me. This coming week won’t be much different, as there are more evening events on the way.

Tonight, for the first time since college, I actually went into a library for the purpose of checking out books. As I spend time looking at great pictures on Flickr, I am very envious of some of the artistic ability of the photographers. I would really like to develop that ability for myself. I’ve generally approached photography as a way of capturing and preserving some of the beauty I see in the world. I would like to take the next step and develop the ability to create rather than merely capture. I checked one book on the history of photography; it has a nice selection of classic photos, and was one of the few books they had that was not about Ansel Adams. The other book was drawing tutorial; I think learning how to draw would help me plan out images I would like to create.

Over the weekend, after Thursday night volleyball and Friday Dad’s night out, I shot family portraits for… everybody. The stats: Thirteen families, 572 clicks, 4.2 GB of images, and a lot of work. Everything turned out great, and I learned a lot. I’m going to bed.

We’ve completed two of our four birthday parties this weekend. Last night everyone was pretty much exhausted, but hopefully today will be a little better; the first party looks to be a little bit shorter, so there will probably be time for nap in between, and the second is nearby, so we won’t have much traveling to do.

Yesterday’s first party was a total madhouse, but lots of fun. There was a pool, and I swear there must have been 40 kids in there, many of them armed with squirt guns. Nevertheless, Anna, who is not terribly comfortable in water (but getting better) had a blast. We put a new floatation vest on her, and she took right to the water, even venturing away from me for short periods of time. We stayed in the water long enough that by the time she got out she was hungry enough to eat two entire slices of pizza, and only once requested some alternate food that was not present at the party.

The second party was more low-key, but still complicated by the presence of their family dog. Anna doesn’t like dogs; she’s quite scared of them. She has had very little exposure to them, and to the best of my knowledge has not had a bad experience. In the last couple weeks, she’s had a little bit more exposure, and has even gone so far as to reach out and try to touch some of the tamer specimens we’ve seen.

Ick

We are still in the throes of some really bad sleep. Anna has a very difficult time going to bed; she is very anxious. In the course of her bedtime routine she will ask, either out of genuine anxiety or just stalling:

• Will the power go off tonight?
• Will her light bulb burn out tonight?
• If the fire alarm goes on, will we be able to hear it?
• If she does not wipe properly after using the potty, will she get sick or die?
• If she does not use the potty at all, will she get sick or die?
• Will we come check on her later?
• Do we promise?
• Do we promise to keep our promise?

Various permutations of these questions bring the total question count up into the tens. We have always had a consistent bedtime routine, but it seems to suffer in cycles of “bedtime build-up” in which Anna adds new little variations which accumulate and make the routine progressively longer and bordering on obsessive. During the listing of the “Happy Things,” we absolutely must include M. and K. on the list, after which she will say “I know lots of people,” so that when I list “going to the pumpkin patch” she can say “I know lots of hay.” This was a joke from so long ago that I’ve forgotten why it was funny in the first place.

Double Ick

In other news, I’ve discovered that my Passat has likely fallen victim to the famed Volkswagen sludge problem, even at only 37,000 miles. Most people with this problem end up with repair bills in the $5,000+ range, and Volkswagen will probably require me to produce all the oil change receipts for the life of the car to get it fixed. I’m not so good at keeping records, but hopefully I can piece things together from the oil change shops; I’ve always used blended or full synthetic oil, and I have changed the oil more often than required, so I hope this can be resolved.

Woohoo

On a more positive note, I got a repeat customer for a product shoot, so I’m going to buy the spiffy new Canon Speedlite 580EX, as an upgrade of my venerable 420EX. This will not only give me a more capable flash unit (it has a jog dial, for heaven’s sake), but I can use the 580 and the 420 together for a portable wireless two-light setup, and with my more powerful monolight for a complete three-light portrait setup. Rock on. I should have the unit by Wednesday, which might even be in time to use it for the client.

This is a really geeky post. It’s sort of like listening to me in person, only you don’t feel obligated to stand there with your eyes glazed over and trying to yawn through your nose.

Since Anna was born, I’m on my fifth digital camera (not counting my wife’s or daughter’s cameras), and am up to almost 30,000 images taken. With each camera, the quality and megapixel count has gone up, and my current store of images amounts to 39 GB–and that just the “keepers” of family photos, and does not include my professional work.

Currently, I use a Canon EOS 20D, which is an 8-megapixel digital SLR. I shoot in RAW+JPEG mode. The JPEG is a small, ready-to-use image file which uses the standard image settings out of the camera. The RAW file preserves all the information directly from the camera sensor and lets me fix it up later on with whatever settings I see fit, adjusting exposure and color in ways that I could not adjust the JPEG file.

The more pictures I have taken, the more I have learned about what makes a good photo, and I’m trying to apply what I’ve learned to my day-to-day shooting. It’s hard to actually try to take well-composed and well-exposed images at the same time you’re trying to capture fleeting moments that will help preserve memories later on. I find that postprocessing is crucial to turn great moments into great photos, and for this I have evolved from straight image-editing pictures to a program called Bibble. The first picture of a train is one that I took on sunny day while I was out with Anna. I really like the picture, but because I had Anna to keep an eye on, I didn’t really think about how the picture was going to be exposed. In particular, there’s a very bright sky, and the train itself is black, which means there’s a heck of a lot of dynamic range in the picture. The first picture is as the camera saved the JPEG file, and although the train is nicely exposed, the sky is completely blown out. Luckily, I was taking the picture in RAW+JPEG mode. The RAW file preserves a lot more of the dynamic range than is represented in the JPEG file, and when I open it in Bibble, I can turn down the exposure by 1.5 stops, and poof, the clouds in the sky are visible. Unfortunately, the train is a big mass of black.

The solution is to produce two images–one exposed for the sky and one for the train, then combine them into a single image in Gimp. Thankfully, most images don’t require this amount of work (even though it only took about five minutes), and Bibble makes short work of adjusting exposure, white balance, and cropping.

Here are a few relevant links:

• Bibble Labs, makers of the Bibble software
• The Raw Truth, a good article about shooting RAW image files.
• Digital Blending, an article about expanding dynamic range with multiple exposures.