Who's Proud?

Yay I have mrs tsuken back! 8) Happy now. Well, I had happy times with the kids, but you know...

Anyway, in the morning, since it was sunny, I went outside to do some work on the park lawn (if I think of it as a park I don't mind how cruddy the grass is). ;-) I removed (finally) the plastic ring thing that aaaaaages ago had housed a vine thing that grew around the fence I took out a few years back <shamefaced> and then, in the same vein, I set about digging out the base of the rotary washing line thing that had been in when we moved in, that I used once - resulting in sheets covered in thrips - and got rid of; father-in-law brought a metal saw thing and sliced it off at the base, as the pole was embedded in a bit of concrete we assumed would be massive, and too hard to get rid of.

Over the years I've tried to get soil to stay on top of it, and grass to overgrow it, so there wouldn't be any chance of anyone (kids) stomping on this (albeit very low) bit of metal. All efforts resulted in failure. So today I finally decided I would go ahead and dig the damn thing out. After a bunch of effort there was a rather big hole, with a correctly-assumed honking great bit of concrete - with embedded metal pole - sitting in it. No way I was going to be able to just pick that up.

I had a couple of iron stakes, one with canvas loop attached, that I had pulled out with the afore-mentioned fence. I grabbed them, and called over the kiddies. I managed to secure the loop around one end of the concrete, put the other end of the stake in the ground, and had the kids jam the other stake in under the concrete as far as they could while I lifted/tilted it. Having moved it into an almost-out position, we swapped, and I had them both pull on the loop-bearing stake while I used the other to lever it completely out of the hole.

And no feet got broken by the crashing mass of concrete. ;-)

Naturally, I then had the kids pose with the excavated hunk. This followed a "hands up who's proud they helped daddy get the stone out of the hole!" 8)

Large here.

Also, I learned something today ... I thought I had the aperture, shutter speed, ISO thing pretty ok, at least conceptually. I thought that while different permutations would give different DoF, blurred/frozen motion, and noise, the exposure itself would be at least similar. Well... Yesterday I got a birdseed bell thing, which hangs higher than the bird feeder, and thus the angle at which I need to shoot (with the 50 mm) puts the bell, and the birds, against sky - which is bright.

I had a fairly wide aperture as per usual, and therefore a fast shutter speed and low ISO; I got dark bird and bell, which were poorly focused or at least damn hard to see, against a big wash of white. Just trying something, I wound the aperture waaaaay closed, and to compensate wound the ISO up; I got this.

Really surprised me. I have done a minor bit of dodging on the cockie, but not much, and the rest of it is pretty much how the RAW converted.