Category: Nikon D80

I love Comic Strips

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Yes… Cobalt and I have an entire bookshelf dedicated to comic books…

So I love comic strips. When I was growing up, my favorite thing about getting the daily paper every day was catching up with my favorite comic strip characters. I guess it didn’t help that I grew up in the town where Charles Shultz (Peanuts) lived… When I went to college, I was really sad that I couldn’t keep up with the comics via the daily paper anymore so I started reading the Seattle Times online every day to keep up with my news and my comic strip friends. I also have quite the collection of various comic strip books that are very slowly migrating from my parents’ house in CA to my house here in CO.

As you may or may not know, we’re sort of at the end of an era here with newspapers – no one is reading paper papers anymore and papers are losing a ton of money. Therefore, newspapers are turning towards their websites to make up the extra slack. Seattle Times.com is going to start charging you to subscribe to their website later this month – a prospect that makes me sad because as a poor grad student, I probably won’t be able to afford it.

Pretty much in time with the crash of the newspapers comes this film – Stripped, codirected by Dave Kellett, who writes Sheldon. This movie interviews a lot of comic strip artists (from Jim Davis who writes Garfield) to Bill Waterson (Calvin and Hobbes) about how comic strips have affected society and what is going to happen to them with the death of newspapers. I think it’s going to be amazing! But they need our help – in order to finish the movie, they need access to various archives (such as the Peanuts short films) that are really expensive. If you care about comic strips half as much as I do, check out this website. It has a neat trailer for the movie, their goals, and rewards for becoming a backer. As of right now, it looks like they’ve reached their first goal now but now they are trying for a second goal (and even more exciting things for their movie). There are some pretty cool rewards for becoming a backer… :)

Now it’s your turn. Tell me what you think about comic strips. Do you have a favorite? I think one of my favorites (it’s not super well known) is Sherman’s Lagoon. I had the Sherman’s Lagoon screensaver on my computer when I was a teenager – you could hear fish getting eaten down the hall when we were eating dinner… :-/

By the way, today is Pi Day! Happy Pi Day! Go eat some pie and think about what an awesome number pi is… :D

One Slimer Cake Coming Up!

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So my friend J wrote a blog post last week about this crazy vegan avocado chocolate cake that she made. I was intrigued because 1) what would a cake made with avocados instead of eggs taste like? and 2) it has freakin’ green avocado buttercream frosting to go with it. So I got the recipe and Cobalt and I set about making the cake. It turned out pretty good actually. It doesn’t really taste like avocados – mostly like chocolate and bananas strangely actually… Also, if you don’t like the idea of slime-green frosting, you can add cocoa powder to your frosting. I think it’s kind of neat green though. Might make for a fun cooking activity for kiddos…

Anyway, upon frosting our cake yesterday afternoon, Cobalt and I decided that it reminded us of Slimer from Cobalt’s favorite movie ever, Ghostbusters. Thus, Cobalt decorated our cake in proper Slimer fashion! Shown above – our claw machine Slimer gazes in awe at himself in cake-form. Below – slimer cake eaten… Yummmm…

In other news, I’ve been in kind of a photography funk lately. I tried to challenge myself this weekend – taking some self portraits of my new octopus earrings (Now I have black ones and I got some yellow ones as a gift too!) and taking some pictures of the ice we acquired from rain/snow on Saturday and I was frustrated with both activities. Booo… I just got some new photography books from the library… I’m hoping they’ll inspire me…

You know what time it is now… Your turn to comment on my post. How do you feel about avocado chocolate cake? Yay? Nay? Curious about that ridiculously green frosting? It’s REALLY sweet. I’ll tell you that… How about hobbies? What do you do when you’re feeling frustrated with your hobbies? Any advice?

Um… I think there’s something on your ear…

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So I’ve been trying to wear earrings more. I mean I’ve had my ears pierced since I was 10 but I rarely wear earrings except for fancy events. As a scientist who works in a lab for the majority of the time, I don’t go to that many fancy events. The problem is that all the earrings I currently own are what I associate with wearing to fancy events so every time I tried to put a pair on before lab, I’d feel way overdressed and take them off again. Then I saw these amazing octopus earrings on my friend E’s Etsy shop. They’re perfect. Super cute and very Potassium-y but not too dressy either. I pretty much immediately ordered a pair. When they arrived on Saturday morning, I put them on and then immediately ordered a black pair, you know for those special black tie/tentacle occasions… or evil occasions… whatever! I will be prepared!

Anyway, if you like these, you should check them out and maybe get your own pair. They come in a variety of colors and they look like nothing I’ve ever seen before. They kind of look like gauge earrings but they have a standard post back so never fear if you don’t want crazy gauged holes in your ears. Pretty much my only complaint so far is that they are a bit heavier than what my ears are used to (which is no earrings at all…) so I’ve been wearing them a lot to get my ears more used to the weight (and because I like them…). These earrings almost make me want to get another set of piercings in my ear lobes so that I can wear the black ones and the green ones simultaneously. ;)

Here’s a different angle… look at those octopus earrings, trying to escape from my hair…

And now it’s your turn. I am still on a hunt for other amazing earrings so do you know of any awesome (but not too expensive) earrings/earring websites I could look at? What kind of earrings do you enjoy wearing (no earrings, dangly, studs, CRAZY OVER THE TOP DANGLY, etc)? Do you have other ear piercings (i.e. industrial, cartilage piercings, etc)? Do you think I should get a second hole pierced? Guy readers, would you wear these? I showed these earrings to one of my lab friends who LOVES octopi but he doesn’t have his ears pierced so I say he’s missing out. ;) Now check out my friend E’s shop! :D

By the way… how is it March already?

Make snow lemonade?

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Lur the great snow shark….

On Sunday, I had a very fun adventure planned. Cobalt and I were going to spend the morning and early afternoon in Denver with our friends and then watch the Oscars in the evening at our house with anyone who wanted to come over. Then it snowed 5 inches before we even got up on Sunday morning… The roads were a mess and it was still snowing pretty hard so nope on the Denver plan. That left me feeling pretty conflicted because I really wanted to go see my friends in Denver but it never snows 5 inches here in Boulder so I also really wanted to go play outside in the snow. Since I didn’t want to drive up to Denver in crazy snow, the only option was to play! So play I did.

I was in luck because my friend L was planning on cross country skiing with her dog along some of the running trails here in Boulder and it turned out she wanted company! I was dressed in all my snow gear and hauling my cross country skis out of our “Harry Potter closet” (it’s under the stairs if you didn’t guess) within ten minutes. L showed up and we frolicked around in the snowy wilderness for the next hour and a half. It was lovely. We had wonderful conversations, skied happily through the snow, and hung out with her adorable black lab. Meanwhile it was still snowing….

Later in the day (now we’re up to 8.5 inches of snow), my friend A came over for the Oscar party but she showed up an hour early so we could play in the snow in Cobalt’s and my backyard. We sat down in the snow like children and proceded to build an enormous snow shark spanning our entire backyard pretty much (it’s not that big… we live in an apartment complex…). His name is Lur and you can see him up there at the top before he got his magnificent pinecone eyes… Here are some pictures of me and A with Lur!


The adventures continued yesterday because Gustav wanted to meet Lur. Here are some pictures of that encounter…

I love that Lur totally dwarfs Gustav…

I think they liked each other because of this Instagram pic…

A and I then escaped lab early yesterday because hey… we rarely get this much snow at once and then on top of that, it rarely stays around more than a few hours (the weather here is weird… 70 degrees one day, snowing the next, 50 degrees after that, you know…). A has a new snowboard and she wanted to play around with it on the hills we have here before actually taking it to a ski resort. So we bundled back up and took my cross country skis and her snowboard up to the hills right by our houses. It turned out to be a fantastic day for playing around in the snow – the sun was very bright and warm and there was sooooo much snow to play with. Some pictures of those adventures…

There’s so much snow you can barely see her snowboard!
Don’t judge my lack of coat/hat in this picture. I had just skied a bunch of laps and I was totally overheating… I was cold after A took this picture though and retreated back to the warmth of my coat…

Whew! I am tired now from all this crazy snow playing. It’s supposed to snow again today too! Too bad I actually have work to do though… ;)

Anyway, I’m sad that I didn’t get to see my friends in Denver yesterday but so happy to have gotten to play in the snow instead. I guess the moral of this story is: when life gives you snow lemons, make snow lemonade!

What’s the weather like where you are? Is it spring yet? Do you get a lot of snow or no snow? What are your thoughts on snow? I hate driving in it but I love playing in it/watching it from the warmth of inside…

To tame the perilous trail!

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We left the shark backpack at our lunch spot and went to go explore a little. It looks like he’s feeling a little left out…

This past weekend, Cobalt and I went on a hike with Cobalt’s friend A, who just moved to Boulder! It turned out to be much more perilous than we had intended as most of the trail is in the shade and, while most of our snow in Boulder has melted, apparently this shaded trail snow has yet to get the message. It was a nice weekend and there were a lot of people out on the trail, packing down the snow and making it a very slippery hike, even in hiking boots. I was very envious of everyone who had crampons strapped to their hiking boots. Cobalt, A, and I got within a quarter mile of our destination and were so tired from sliding up the mountain that we decided to stop for lunch. It was a fairly secluded spot and gave me a great view for some photography!

After lunch, we slid back down the mountain (A actually slipped and rode part of the way on his butt – this is after making fun of me for slowly making my way down in front of him…. ahaha).

Now it’s your turn. Tell me about a scary hike you went on and why it was scary. Or tell me about your favorite hiking story or your favorite trail to hike in Colorado. The title of this post comes from a song we played in band in high school called “To Tame the Perilous Skies” by David Holsinger… I thought it was appropriate.

One more thing. Today is my friend HtomSirveaux’s birthday! Yay! Happy birthday friend! I hope you have a great day!

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit eating gluten…

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(Oven) Mitt Nomney did his job of helping me get the hot pan out of the oven and now he wants some breakfast bars as payment!

So some of you may know this but I love eating. I would eat even if we didn’t have to to survive. I also eat pretty much everything, even if it’s something I claim I don’t like. If I am hungry enough, I will probably eat it. Really, the only surefire way to keep me from eating something (if you are Cobalt trying to protect your food from the hungry Potassium for example), is to eat something that could kill me or makes my stomach hurt a lot. Basically, that leaves the nuts that I am allergic to (pistachios and cashews) as the only foods I will definitely not eat. Pork makes my stomach hurt but sometimes ham and bacon are just so delicious that I will even steal a bite of those things.

Okay, we are getting majorly off topic here – the point is that I love eating but I also am realizing how important it is to be aware of what I am eating. I’ve been noticing that I kind of just shove food in my mouth all the time without thinking about how many other bagels I’ve already eaten today or how I should probably not eat this entire block of cheese (or I do the “T-rex” when Cobalt and I make pot roast for dinner – eating waaaaay more than I should because it’s so freakin’ good, I can’t stop). So I was thinking about diets like the paleo diet and gluten free diets where people just totally abolish certain food groups from their life (though sometimes the gluten free diet is necessary for those friends with celiac disease). I am not sure I could force myself to stop eating such tastiness like cheese and bread and rice completely but I think I like the idea of thinking about how MUCH tastiness like cheese and bread go into my body every day. So as I was pondering all these diets and what my life would be like if I stopped eating all that tastiness, I had a horrible thought cross my mind. WHAT WOULD I EAT FOR BREAKFAST?!?!?!

So breakfast is really important to me, partially because I get hangry (hungry/angry) if I don’t eat regularly. If I fail to eat breakfast though, I get hangry and super out of it and it’s just bad. In general though, most of the breakfast foods I eat would not be allowed for someone on the paleo diet. So I went on a mission to learn about what people on the paleo diet eat for breakfast and I found this delicious recipe for Blackberry Breakfast Bars which are: gluten free, dairy free, and paleo appropriate. Then I went to the store and got all the ingredients and made them. Here are some pictures from my adventures:

Yay! I found all the ingredients (either after digging through our cabinets in the kitchen to find them or running through the store to find them)!

I decided to make my own coconut flour out of coconut chunks – mostly because all of this was really spontaneous and it was actually kind of late on a weeknight and I didn’t feel like driving to the health food store to get coconut flour. However, it turned out to be really easy to do once I figured out how to work the food processor.

The final product cooling on the stove! It was delicious. Tasted like banana bread with blackberries and coconut in it. If you had fed them to me, I never would have guessed that they weren’t your typical flour and milk type banana bread bars. Yum.

All in all I think it was a good adventure for me because 1) it really did make me think about all the food groups and what I eat every day and 2) it was actually really good even though it was slightly more of a pain to track ingredients down for. In conclusion, I’m probably never going to switch to a diet like the paleo diet but I appreciate the recipes for forcing me to think about the amount of carbs, milk, etc I put in my body.

What do you think? Are you on a diet like the paleo diet or other diet? How did you give up cheese (and bread?! Think of the bagels!!!!)? Would you ever consider going on a diet like that? What is your favorite kind of food?

Stars!

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Today’s fun with lights post involves stars! So now basically, I turned all my out of focus light into star shapes (instead of those pointy starbursts from Tuesday’s post). This is also done by messing with the aperture on a prime (non zoom) lens. Basically, I cut out a star shape on cardstock and taped it in front of my lens. Then I used a really wide aperture (refer to this lovely picture from Wikipedia if you need to refresh your memory from Tuesday – the top is a wide aperture and the bottom is a narrow aperture) to take all these pictures. This wide aperture + the star in front means that all of the out of focus light turned into the shape of stars instead of circles.

Anyway, below are some other fun examples of stars. The top is my Christmas lights again.

So I’m not sure how many of you know that I play trombone but I do (I used to play it a lot more in high school and college… boo grad school eating up all my time)! Here is my trombone covered in stars:

Fun with tealights and mirrors, part 1:

Fun with tealights and mirrors, part 2:

Yay! Shapes! What shape should I try next? My friend Jem has done this with music notes! Super cool idea! Do you guys have any fun plans for this weekend? This is my last full week in lab before Cobalt and I escape for the holidays so I will probably be working… :p

Fun with Christmas Lights!

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I’ve decided that today’s and Thursday’s posts will be full of fun with lights! Today we focus on Christmas lights! I bought some purple Christmas lights (though they look red in these pictures…) this weekend and put them up around mine and Cobalt’s office. So immediately, the camera came out and I had to play with various settings. Today we are exploring starbursts! I briefly talked about them last week in my post about A but here’s how it works. If you have a prime lens (so it doesn’t zoom) and you set your aperture really narrow (= a small hole in the lens), any out of focus light will be the shape of the petals of the aperture (Click here for a picture of a large (top) and small (bottom) aperture from Wikipedia). So the smaller the aperture, the more starbursty the out of focus light becomes. It’s kind of fun to play with…

Anyway, here are a few more pictures of me playing with my Christmas lights…

Those of you who are my friends on Facebook have probably seen this one by now (It’s a self portrait taken with my awwwwesome remote control for my camera… TOTALLY worth the extra cash btw for those of you who are thinking of purchasing DSLRs… makes family pictures during the holidays SUPER fun/easy):

More starbursts:

Getting these Christmas lights was actually one of the highlights of my weekend. Life has been fairly ridiculous for us lately so anything that I can do to make our office/house more relaxing/comforting/etc is a huuuuge plus.

Tell me how you feel about Christmas lights! Do you like them? Hate them? How much is too much? I’ve seen a lot of people wrapping Christmas lights around just the tree trunks in their front yards this year… I’ve gotta tell you that I’m not so sure I’m a fan. It looks like a lit up post in the middle of a dark yard… :-/

Speaking of Christmas lights, here is my favorite picture I took with Instagram in downtown Denver this weekend:

Mountain Girl

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When my friend Jem was in town a few weeks ago, we went up to Chautauqua Park in Boulder with our friend A so that A could model and Jem and I could practice taking portrait shots. Chautauqua is awesome for photography because it’s snuggled up to the base of the Flatirons that look over Boulder (so it’s very picturesque) but it’s also annoying because if you don’t get there at exactly the right time of day, the sun makes taking pictures really hard (it’s too bright or it’s already hidden behind the Flatirons)! The lighting was definitely a bit frustrating when we were there but it made for a good challenge to get good pictures of A! Yay portrait practice! Can’t wait till you get a DSLR too A so that we can model for you to return the favor! :) Anyway, it was really fun and A did a great job being photogenic so I’d have to say this was a success.

I love the picture above because the rock A is standing next to mirrors the giant Flatirons behind it. I love the pictures below too… Take a look!

This one I am proud of because I just learned to make that reflection of the sun in her sunglasses into that starbursty shape. I love it. It makes the pic look super epic.

For some reason, I love the dramatic backlighting and A’s windblown hair in this picture. Plus you can see the Flatirons in the background.

This one is fun because you can see me and Jem in A’s glasses. Hi Jem! :)

What are you like in front of the camera? Are you an absolute ham like I am (sometimes it’s seriously really hard for me to decide if I want to be in front of or behind the camera…) or do you run from the camera? Is there something you really hate about yourself in pictures of you (I always feel like I’m slouching in pictures :p)? What about something you love?

By the way, don’t you love how beautiful and sunny all those pictures of A are? Yeah… it’s been ridiculously warm here… So much for December being wintery. Though I guess we are supposed to get snow this weekend…

Dropsy Turvy

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Yay! A post! And one with crazy water droplets! The pictures in today’s post comes from last weekend when my friend Jem was in town and we gave each other various photo challenges. This one was by far the hardest because it requires dropping water into a bowl full of water and capturing the droplets falling and landing in the bowl. You have to have a lot of light so you can use high shutter speeds (so the drops don’t look blurry) AND you have to take hundreds of pictures so that you can at least get a few cool pictures. So the set up is pretty much as complicated as taking the actual picture. Jem and I made an impromptu light box and pretty much filled it with all sorts of lights. I think the best way to do this type of photography is to use an external flash but Jem and I didn’t have one so we had to improvise with a couple of desk lights, an overhead light in the room, etc. Anyway, then we set up the background behind the water (in the picture above, it is the sheet music – this picture was inspired by this one taken by Patrick Latter). Then we played with a variety of camera settings (longer and shorter shutter speeds, smaller or larger ISO and F numbers, her camera vs my camera), backgrounds, and the water itself (we added blue food coloring to the water at first and then some milk). Fun times.

The picture above and the pictures below are some of my favorite pictures from my camera.

What do you think? It’s craziness! I love how the pictures (which have been adjusted only for white balance and shadows) look ridiculously 70’s… So many colors…. How are you guys? It’s getting to be holiday season so I’ve been thinking a lot about traditions. Do you have any awesome traditions that you do every year? Is it something you’ve done forever with your family or is it something you and your spouse/significant other came up with? What’s the story behind it? I want to know everything! :D