Category: Misc

Posted on

Elia Contemplative as She Watches TV in the Wee Hours

1-ACC_4728-001

Another picture that won’t make any collage, but that I like for some reason. After going to bed and falling asleep with Erin, Elia will often wake up when Curie goes up to bed. I  then take her downstairs to watch some TV before she sleeps again.  Again, I love the color interplay in the shot and the seriousness of her concentration with her chin on the cup.

I have been changing all our lights to almost all 5000 to 6500K “daylight” CFL bulbs to complement the lightbox-like effect of the closed translucent white shades we have in the living room in the day time. I had been getting weird colored lighting from the hall and kitchen mixed in, so now those are pretty white too. The only places that still have incandescent (2600K) lighting are the bathroom (Curie says the light there is yellow and I need to fix it), and the chandeliers, which I refuse to pay the premium for LED lights there and instead have neodymium Reveal GE lights at about 2850K. This shot is lit with two CFLs in a standing lamp and the chandelier side-lighting (explaining the warmth in the lighting) and the TV giving the low reflecting light to achieve the faux-Rembrandt lighting effect.

Almost all of my DSLR photography is shot at 85mm wide open at 1.4 handheld. This was aperture priority at a shutter of 1/100. Picture is contrast corrected with a hint of fill but not color corrected and cropped to 5×7 for effect. The movie was Lilo and Stitch on Netflix and the drink Horizon whole milk with added DHA in a Munchkin snap-close sippy cup. Floppy Bunny is a light blue medium sized Peep plush from the Peep store at National Harbor.

Added from Facebook: Not long after this shot she put the sippy cup aside put her head down put her butt in the air a la Marty McFly, and fell asleep.

Posted on

Curie Up Late Feeling Sick on Vacation

1-ACC_4419

One of the biggest challenges of being a parent is when your kids get sick. Here is Curie with the coxsackie virus (hand foot mouth) where she couldn’t eat anything and was profoundly sad that even the ice cream and cookies she thought she might be able to handle hurt her mouth. We are at the hotel evaluating if she could fly the next day to go to Thomas Land in Edaville the second week after opening (she got a lot better the next day).

I found this shot and color striking, this is the shot unfiltered and unedited except to crop to 8 x 10. The lighting for this one is just from the tablet. ISO 1600, hand held at 1/40 and F1.4 on an 85mm prime.

Posted on

The Chen Engineering Company

Recently Erin instituted mandatory play at the house to curb screen time which has resulted in bringing the slide and basketball hoop from the basement to the living room for Elia and Curie to play, there is piano playing, drawing, painting, pig pile on Mommy, elephant and horsey rides and all manners of roughhousing that you might imagine for an almost four and a one-and-a-half year old.

But there is a little bit of time when Elia and Erin go up for a bath that becomes Daddy and Curie engineering time where Curie’s imagination gets to run wild and Albert helps her make her ideas a reality (Elia is still in the knocking-down-is-more-fun-than-the-frustration-of-not-being-able-to-build-yet phase – though she has started playing trains without tearing up the track). To be fair, Erin has long built houses with Curie ever since she was a toddler. The reason for this post though is that in recent months Curie has become much more dextrous in her ability to build and create.

We have three train sets, a Duplo one, a wooden Thomas/Chuggington/IKEA/Brio set, and a VTech track from Shawn and Chris and Cy and Librada. Erin’s father and Curie had a great time building tracks, but here is a recent Chen Engineering Company production:

3-Untitled-002

If you haven’t played with Kapla, they are precisely cut blocks of all the same shape that you build in to amazing things. They used to be very expensive, but recently Ikea started making their own. Curie wanted to build a house for her Playmobil, Octonaut, and Frozen figures to live. One thing led to another and here we are:

2-Untitled1

There are Lego sets that are amazing recreations of things from the VW Camper van to the Star Destroyer to architectural sets, essentially models made of Lego. But Lego and Duplo were really about creativity back in the day. We have a Duplo set that Suephy and Ed handed down to us that Curie and Elia play with. The other night Curie wanted to build a restaurant so here is a table with nine chairs, a stair case to the oven (where we were cooking Sven and Pabbi – don’t ask), and Joy and Sadness as Giants were looking on. If you look carefully Sir Topham Hat and some strawberry girl were eating with two Playmobil people. The trees were from a previous project:

1-2015-07-29