Category: Nikon D80

Top Secret Crochet Project pt 1

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Meet Woky! He was my top secret crochet project #1 of the fall. This isn’t the current top secret crochet project mentioned in Monday’s post though. You’ll have to wait on that one. Anyway, this is Woky. He is an ewok in case you were thinking he was a cute teddy bear with a hood (:-/) and his hood is removable. I made him for my friend Jem! A few months ago, my friend J suggested that we make crocheted ewoks together and I thought that sounded fun! J is a much faster crocheter than me so she finished her ewok in record time. Meanwhile slow Potassium took months to finally finish Woky (this does not bode well for my current top secret crochet project….). It was awesome in the end though because I finished Woky about a week before Jem was supposed to come into town for a visit. Somehow she figured out that she was getting an ewok though I think she was still happy that she was right. She promptly named him Woky! :) Before Jem came into town, we took Woky to the pumpkin patch for a photoshoot. So without further ado, may I present Woky!

This is before the pumpkin patch; Woky decided he wanted to ride the great shark Finn across the house… Cobalt can’t look at this picture without thinking of riding the sand worms in Dune…
Ewoks in the corn maze!
I think Woky has chosen a pumpkin….

I am super proud of Woky. I’d say he turned out pretty well! His pattern was pretty hard (I had to keep asking J for help… that’s partly why he took so long to finish…).

In other fun crafty news, my friend Jem and I are thinking of starting an Etsy shop for our photographs and possibly my crocheted creatures (though I am super slow so I’m not sure about that). Anyone have any comments about that? Do you have an Etsy shop? Is it awesome? Stressful? Let’s discuss (topics: Etsy/ewoks/anything else you’ve been dying to tell me)!

Curious…

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Whew… I hope you all had happy Thanksgiving weeks last week! I took last week off from posting because it was technically vacation at school… grad students don’t really get vacations from lab (those darn cells, always needing something….) so I took a vacation from my other activities (such as writing in here) instead.

So what have I been up to?

Well besides reading a bunch of young adult books (I read 3 books in about as many days… :-/) and eating (over the past week, yours truly has helped eat 1 turkey breast, 1 turkey, and 2 ducks… not to mention a ridiculous amount of stuffing, mashed potatoes, and other delicious Thanksgiving favorites), I did lot of arts and crafts. These include a super secret crochet project, fun crafts from a “Crafternoon” with my sis in law and other friends, whale drawings, and (of course) photography. My friend Jem was in town for Thanksgiving so she and I gave ourselves various photography tasks. So in the next few days/weeks/etc, look forward to posts about all those crafts up there plus more star photography, pictures of our friend A modeling for us (see pic above for an example of that), and cool water droplet pictures similar to this one by Patrick Latter.

In other news, I am starting an informal class that meets on Mondays and Wednesdays at school. Depending on what my homework is like, I might have to switch these posts to Tuesdays and Thursdays for a bit so I can spend Sunday and Tuesday nights doing my homework instead of planning fun blog posts… :-/

How was your Thanksgiving? Did you do any Black Friday shopping? Are you doing any Cyber Monday shopping right now? What is your favorite activity to do to relax? I loooooove being creative (or reading).

Halloweekend 2012!

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Yay! Halloween is this week! Cobalt and I celebrated all weekend! On Friday evening, we had a Halloween party at our apartment. We dressed up like Frankenstein’s monster and his bride as you can see in this picture.


Then on Sunday, we had some friends over and we carved our pumpkins we got at the pumpkin patch last week. I of course made my pumpkin into a shark. It was a bit tricky because over the course of last week, a squirrel decided that my pumpkin would make a tasty snack and started taking little bites out of the whole pumpkin. Needless to say, I moved my pumpkin inside before too much damage was done but I did have to think cleverly about how I carved it to get rid of the bite marks. The picture on top has most of our pumpkins – Cobalt’s was a little too dark to be see in this picture so I posted another picture below with just my shark pumpkin and his skull pumpkin.


Yay!

My mom is in town for the beginning of this week! I am excited to hang out with her. What are you guys up to? Did you do anything special for Halloween this weekend?

Pumpkins acquired + rocks!

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Busy weekend here in Boulder! I think I can safely say I got most of the stuff on my to do list done. Could always have more relaxing of course but you know…

Anyway, as mentioned in Friday’s post, we went to the pumpkin patch on Saturday! I got that epically sized pumpkin shown up there and my friend A got that normal sized pumpkin that she’s standing with. I had originally chosen a similarly sized pumpkin with the perfect orange hue but then I found that fatty and fell in love. You know how it is…

I also like him because he has such a good stem… looks like a shark fin. Wahaha… stay tuned till next week to see the carved version!

Anyway, we all got nice pumpkins and then we headed up into the mountains above Boulder for some rock climbing in the afternoon. It was a perfect day for it: warm, sunny, not too many people on the rocks. It was my first time actually bouldering outside so it was a neat experience. After we tried bouldering a little, we just scrambled around on the rocks. Here is a picture of Cobalt and our friend M staring off at Boulder.

In case you don’t believe that we were actually that high off the ground, here’s what the city of Boulder looked like from our perch. I love the colors of the trees and I love how small everything looks in this picture:

Awesomeness! I had so much fun this weekend! Can’t wait to go climbing again! And I definitely can’t wait to carve my pumpkin. I am thinking a shark because of that awesome stem but I don’t know. Anyone else have any ideas? What did you do this weekend? Something fun I hope? How’s the weather where you are? Still fall-like? We’re supposed to get some snow later this week… :-/

That awkward moment

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when you realize you can’t be two places at once.

Let’s start up the Wedding Wednesday posts again! First of all, I think we are supposedly going to get our professional wedding pictures soon (finalllllly) and second of all, there is stuff that I never finished talking about.

So let’s start. We’re married now (yaaaaay!) and the holidays are quickly approaching… What are we going to do about Christmas? For those of you who don’t know, Christmas is a big deal to both of our families. However, Cobalt’s immediate family is in NM and my immediate family is in CA. Every year before this year, Cobalt has gone to NM and I have gone to CA for at least Christmas Eve and Christmas Day so this year marks the first year we will be together on the actual Christmas holiday. The problem is… which family do we spend the holiday with? We already decided that we want to try to see both families during the Christmas season but of course only one family can see us for the actual holiday. Cobalt and I have been stressing out over this issue… mmmm since we got married… because we know that at least one family is going to be sad and one of us will be sad because we won’t be spending Christmas proper all together. That said, we love both of our families a lot so Christmas is still going to be special… just… different. However, it’s time to stop freaking out about it and actually buy tickets because holy crap they are getting really expensive.

Now it’s your turn. Any advice for the newlyweds? What did you do your first Christmas together?

Picture: One of the many crochet sharks I made, “Licky shark,” licking an ornament on my family’s Christmas tree last year. I took this picture when I was playing with the out of focus light so you can see that the reflection on Licky shark’s eye (and all the other out of focus light) is in the shape of a star. I like it…

Goin’ to the zoo, part two!

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I thought I’d continue on with my zoo post from Monday today. I apologize for those of you wanting a Wedding Wednesday post. I have stuff to talk about on that front (the minimoon will make an appearance!) but I felt like talking about the zoo again today.

So when we left off in our story Monday, Cobalt, A, and I had returned to the booth where we rented out camera equipment. I went up to the guy at the Nikon table and said “What else you got?!” Not that I was unhappy with my 18-300 mm zoom lens from Monday. Mostly, I just wanted to see what else I could play with. The Nikon guy hooked me up with an 85 mm prime lens. Really, the only word you need to take away from that sentence is the word “prime” as in a fixed, non zoom lens. He told me it would be excellent for low light conditions (the 18-300 mm lens really wasn’t that great for low light conditions) and then sent us back off into the zoo.

At first, I was regretting being so bold about switching lenses. Here we were in the middle of a BRIGHT day and I had a non-zoomable lens that was good at taking pictures in low light conditions. Ohhhh greattttt. Cobalt and A were zooming in on monkeys and I was grumpily glaring at my lens. Then we came to the spider monkey up above and I realized this lens had some potential. This lens is so good in low light conditions because it can do really low f numbers – this is something that controls the amount of light that goes into the lens as well as controlling the depth of field. When you set the lens to take pictures with really low f numbers, you are asking it to let a ton of light into the camera and as a result, it has a very shallow depth of field. Shallow enough that anything you are NOT focusing on gets really blurry… like the fence in front of the spider monkey. You can’t really see it at all even though there was definitely a fence between him and me. Wahaha… The other tricky thing about the spider monkey pictures was that the holes in the fence were really small. The camera’s autofocus function couldn’t find the monkey behind the fence so I had to manually focus the lens to find him. I think it turned out pretty good!

It was at this point that I felt a challenge rising. Zooming was one way to take cool pictures of animals, what about playing with the lighting and the depth of field? Challenge accepted, prime lens!

Okay, it’s no zoom lens but to be honest, the idea of a lens that could seemingly do everything (wide angle and crazy zoomed in) left me kind of suspicious as to what it COULDN’T do. Hence the bold “what else you got?!” and the handing over of the prime lens. And by the end, I had a healthy respect for the prime lens – especially after we visited the reptile house and my lens totally ruled at getting cool pictures of those creatures that like to lurk in the dark (without using a flash)…

Really, I think if anything, this experience with the prime lens reminded me why it’s good to have a variety of lenses – a zoom lens of course for zooming in on cool things that are far away, but also a prime lens that is really good at taking pictures at that one focal length and makes me focus on the details of the picture I am taking (the lighting and the composition of the picture). Makes me happy that I do have both (an 18 to 70 mm lens – nowhere near the zooming capability of Monday’s lens – and a 50 mm prime lens)!

And now without further rambling – some more prime lens pictures!

Another one of the adorable spider monkey…

The flamingo on the left wants to be the center of attention. Ooo ooo! Look at me!

This frog looks like it knows something we don’t. Also, I love how fat he is…

Hey guys… how’s it goin’? I’m just chillin’ here… you know how it is…

And finally, a penguin for those of you who asked…

Do you have a favorite picture (either from Monday or today)? Do you like the zoom lens pictures or the prime lens pictures better? Also, I love it when a picture tells a story. You guys want to play the caption game with my pictures? Let’s go! What are all the animals saying?

Goin’ to the zoo – close ups

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This weekend, Cobalt, A and I went to the Denver zoo because Mike’s Camera, the big camera store out here was hosting a zoo day. They were out there renting out cameras, lenses, and tripods to anyone who wanted to play with photography. (In case you were wondering, this is similar to the day I spent with the butterflies at the Butterfly Pavilion). This time was awesome because both Cobalt and A rented fancy DSLR cameras too and then we all got to rent super epic lenses. So the three of us trekked around the zoo with our expensive cameras/lenses capturing the wildlife (funny story: Cobalt and I kept hearing small children being excited to see the squirrels running around the zoo… really children? You see squirrels every day… LOOK AT THAT ELEPHANT! *sigh*). I actually switched expensive fancy lenses halfway through and then ended up taking something ridiculous like 427 pictures (!!!!) between the two of them. Since I took a bunch of keepers, I decided to write two posts on the zoo day, one for the pictures taken with each lens.

So today… we discuss the amazing 18 mm by 300 mm lens I tried out first. For those of you that aren’t keen on photography terms, this lens does EVERYTHING. It can do super close ups like these creatures on today’s post or it can do your typical “wide angle” type expansive mountain shots (not shown today). So that’s pretty amazing. It was also REALLY heavy. My hand was getting tired by the time I got back to switch lenses.

One more thing I want to say about these pictures is that I want to thank Patrick for his amazing zoo pictures and his “how to” zoo picture taking guide on his blog. Really got me thinking about the best way to capture the animals at our zoo with my epic lenses…

And without further ado… more pictures…

I like this tiger pic a lot. He just seems so grand but also kitty-like.

Action shot!

I am not sure what this creature is but I like it… They were hanging out with these neat birds. Maybe I will post a picture of them later…

So, this elephant picture is really special because Mike’s Camera had a bunch of HUGE lenses set up on tripods by the elephants. You basically gave the guy your lens and then hooked your camera up to one of the epic crazy lenses. That’s why I decided to focus on this elephant’s eye. I like it… Boo that I couldn’t get rid of the fence though….

That’s all for today! I had so much fun being an epic photographer with Cobalt and A! It was awesome that all three of us got to play with cameras at the same time. Made for a great time at the zoo. Look forward to seeing more pictures from the other lens later this week!

What is your favorite zoo animal? I might be able to post a cool picture of it… :) What did you do this weekend?

Golden

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This past Saturday, Cobalt and I went up to Aspen with our friends A, J, K, T, and L to continue our search for fall (which officially started this weekend). The seven of us checked into our condo and immediately headed for the fancy hot tubs and pool.

J, A, and T hanging out at the hot tub

Then we spent the rest of the evening feasting on Chinese delicacies mostly made by T, J, and K, though we all helped. There was sooooo much food that we all totally overstuffed ourselves.

In the morning, L and K made us an epic breakfast consisting of eggs, bacon, pancake balls stuffed with red beans, and Korean pancakes. Oh and Cobalt found this crazy Dragonfruit when we were shopping on Friday night so we ate that too. Then we headed up to the Maroon Bells (two mountains near Aspen) to check out the beautiful changing aspens (all that gold in that top picture comes from the aspens). It turned out to be a wonderful day for running around and being silly in the midst of these gorgeous trees and mountains. I ended up being a crazy photographer who would lie down in the middle of the trail just to get the perfect shot.

K and J with the prettiness behind them…

The first set of pictures I took were pictures of everyone jumping up and down. T was especially good at it as you can see in this picture.

Jumping

T jumping while L checks out a recent picture…
A and T jumping with aspens behind them

Then we decided to take some “Hunger Games” shots, so named because I would focus on the aspens and hold my camera steady while everyone else ran through the trees, getting slightly blurred, not unlike the way the Hunger Games movie was filmed.

Hunger Games


Finally, here is a picture of part of our group towards the end of the trip, J and K had already left at this point.

This trip was so much fun. The drive to and from Aspen was beautiful (the changing trees made the scenery look painted gold), I had a ton of fun with my friends, I got to see the Maroon Bells (which I had never seen before), and I got to have a lot of fun being really creative with my DSLR. I was talking to A today about “life changing experiences” and how I feel like I’ve had a lot of them this year (getting married was obviously one). I think this trip was definitely a life changing experience too. It was so neat to see everything come together – from shopping for food with T, A, and Cobalt on Friday night, to riding the bus up to the Maroon Bells, to running around like crazy people through the aspens… I think it all lead to me feeling at peace with myself and the world for a bit and that was awesome.

Because I posted this today and not on Monday, all bets are off on what the rest of the week will look like. Also, if you want to hear more about the trip/see more pictures/learn about how I took some of them, I have about 173 more pictures left so I can always post more in another post if anyone is interested.

Now it’s your turn. Is fall happening where you are right now? Do the trees change color? What is one of the best life changing experiences that has happened for you recently? Let’s discuss.

Who can make the longest udon noodle?

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This weekend was full of activities. On Saturday, Cobalt and I volunteered by getting college students registered to vote. We were strictly not allowed to discuss politics or political parties (seriously, all we could say was “Hi! Have you updated your voter registration information? If not you can do it now and it only takes 90 seconds…”) and people replied by yelling all sorts of insults at us about the presidential candidates… It was a bit awkward. Oh and we were in the sun for 2.5 hours and we only got two people to register. That was kind of depressing. Come on Colorado! It’s fun being a swing state! :-/

Then yesterday we made salmon teriyaki with homemade udon noodles! The recipe called for stretching the noodles out after we cut them and before we boiled them. Cobalt and I had a lot of fun with that part, as you can see from the above and below pictures.

Aw yeah… This noodle is gonna be great!

The salmon teriyaki also turned out pretty delicious as you can see from the following picture. Result!

You know you want to eat this…

What did you do this weekend? Have you noticed that almost all of my food posts are about noodles? Maybe I should try some other recipe just to be balanced. Do you like cooking? What is your favorite thing to make from scratch? I have to say that pie crust is kind of fun. I got a little obsessed with making homemade pie crust during my first year of grad school… It would probably be easier to make now that we have all these sweet cooking wedding presents… :)

Is Fall here yet?

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Hey! I hope you all had great weekends! In honor of the holiday weekend, I think I will be posting on Tuesday and Thursday this week instead of my usual MWF posts (maybe you’ll get a Friday post too… who knows). Anyway, today has some pictures from this weekend. On Saturday, Cobalt and I went up into the mountains to see if fall had arrived yet (yeahhhh… we’re getting a little tired of the hot Colorado summer days). We were checking out the aspen trees to see if they’d turned the gorgeous shade of yellow they turn in the fall. The results: sommmmeeeee aspen trees turned…

Bottom picture: on our journey, we found this random Ford hubcap so I decided to take some cool grungy shots too. :D

Anyway, Cobalt and I had a very productive weekend. Our apartment is starting to look like a real apartment! Yay!!!! Did you guys do anything fun?!