So I celebrated Pi Day with some friends yesterday and had a nice time.  The pies and treats were delicious.  Sadly I didn't bring a cherry pie for Julie, I will have to remember to do that next year.  The blueberry pie was great, the chicken pot pie was delicious, and though the glutin-free lemon meringue was very runny, it still tasted fine.

We played games (I had a nice long game of Carcassonne, and other people played Bohnanza), made up silly jokes and songs, and just had a very nice afternoon.  I got to meet some new friends, and spend a little time with some old ones. And I ate WAY too much pie.

This morning my idle mind wrote a little song parody based on the day which I decided to share here:

You made me blueberry,
Apple and pecan;
Wet meringue with lemon goo
And pot pie tastes so grand.

(The bigger, the better)
Our tummies fully crammed...
Collected from around the world
we'll eat them if we can!

Pies pies pies yeah!
Pies pies pies yeah!
Pies pies pies yeah!
Pies pies pies yeah!

The pound cake was delicious,
And whoopie pies were fine.
But poor Julie got no cherry,
What a waste of time.

Big ones and small ones,
Look lovely to our eyes,
Tantalizing on the plate,
Not so much on our thighs...

Pies pies pies yeah!
Pies pies pies yeah!
Pies pies pies yeah!
Pies pies pies yeah!

Go back to your larder,
Fetch me another plate,
My pancreas is still alive,
And I'm not the sort to wait.

The bigger, the better,
And some are glutin free,
So what if you don't eat your share,
More for me and me and me and me and me and

Pies pies pies yeah! (We're gonna eat you.)
Pies pies pies yeah! (Not too discreet to.)
Pies pies pies yeah! (Fat like a B-2.)
Pies pies pies yeah!

Oh you know I know...

Pies pies pies yeah!
Pies pies pies yeah!
Pies pies pies yeah!
Pies pies pies yeah!

Oh you know I know...

Pies pies pies yeah!
Pies pies pies yeah!
Pies pies pies yeah!
Pies pies pies yeah!

Last week's ice storm really socked us here in Fitchburg.  We lost power for seven days, but fortunately had access to a generator so we could run our furnace.  Finally got my pictures from the storm uploaded.

Just taking a moment to wish a happy thanksgiving to my friends and anyone else who happens by.  I'll be visiting Mom today for a thanksgiving dinner.  I don't know how much I'll be able to eat though--exactly seven days ago I had the last of my teeth removed.  My mouth is still pretty sore and the new dentures, unfortunately, don't seem to fit well.  But I'll muddle through.

Sorry I haven't written much.  I just haven't had much to say.  Strangely, things in the news that have outraged me haven't given me the urge to write, mostly because it seems to be the same thing every time.  (Prop 8's passage for example.)

So today I found myself agreeing with someone online and went to type "hear hear" but then remembered seeing someone else type "here here" a couple days earlier.

I was pretty sure the correct phrase was "hear hear" as opposed to the other variants I'd seen ("here here", "hear here", "here hear") but I'd never actually looked it up. So I decided to check popular internet usage using Google:

1. "hear hear" = 1,740,000 hits
    
2. "here here" = 3,880,000 hits
    
3. "hear here" = 307,000 hits
    
4. "here hear" = 334,000 hits

Well dang. According to popular usage twice as many people say "here here" than say "hear hear". But is that correct? Wikipedia says no:

Hear hear (Wikipedia):
...Hear, hear is an expression used as a short repeated form of hear ye and hear him. It represents a listener's agreement with the point being made by a speaker.

It was originally an imperative for directing attention to speakers, and has since been used, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as "the regular form of cheering in the House of Commons", with many purposes depending on the intonation of its user. It is often incorrectly spelled "here here", especially on websites...

A quick double check of OneLook Dictionary Search confirms this. Six dictionaries list "hear hear" and only one lists "here here" (and that one happens to be the wiki article above.)

Popular usage drives the movement of meaning, though, so at some point in the future "here here" may end up being the correct phrase if we don't do something about it.

So if you want to avoid yet another English colloquialism that will have your great grandchildren scratching their heads and saying "WTF?" (or whatever kids will be saying in those days) then type "hear hear" at every opportunity.

Go on, say it, you know you want to.

---

So my friend Brian had an idea for a fun photo he wanted me to create for him.  He wanted to be Gulliver of Gulliver's Travels, tied down on a beach by the Lilliputians... all of whom would be played by his wife Lynnea.

I originally wanted to shoot this on a beach (as per the original idea) but the lake in Chelmsford, MA that we were relaxing at didn't afford a beach with a suitable layout for the shot.  So we instead did it on a nearby grassy knoll.

First we "bound" Bri by encircling him over and over with a thin twine.  Then I helped him lie on a slightly raised knoll and lay flat before him so that the camera would be angled up to make him appear bigger.  I said "imagine there is a six inch high person standing on your chest lecturing you" so that he would look in that direction.  That was the first shot.

The subsequent shots all featured Lynnea using the thickest rope I could find on short notice as a prop.  Bri would stand out of shot (typically on a footstool) and hold the rope while Lynnea would pull on it this way and that.

After recording about a dozen different poses, we did the lecturing pose, and then I shot the "sitting on the toes pose" when Lynnea was just relaxing on the stool.  I thought the pose would come in useful and as you can see it did.

Shots were all done by daylight, no flash. EOS 5D with the EF 24-70mm 2.8L lens, which is the widest I own.

Then, after some cleanup in lightroom, came the hours of photoshop work to carefully clip Lynnea out of her surroundings in various pictures and edit her into this one at reduced scale.  I thought the grass, which to a Lilliputian should be knee high at least, would be a problem, but it turned out that just using a gradient transparency on the ends of her legs (or whatever was closest to the ground) worked fine unless you look really close.

Things I would do differently if I shot this again:

1. I really need to get a chromakey backdrop for shoots like this.  I shot Lynnea against a grassy green background, but that was not uniform enough to make clipping her out simple... it was fun, but it was a LOT of work.
    
2. Lynnea had been swimming prior to the shoot, and threw on a pair of pants for her poses.  But in each subsequent pose water slowly seeped through the material and created spots in various places.  I was mostly able to edit those out, but it was additional work.
    
3. Get thicker rope, or simply edit the rope out altogether and use the twine.  The size difference between the reduced rope and the twine bugs me a little.
    
4. A beach location with a nice uniform ocean background would have made for easier editing.
    
5. I would have backed off a little more when shooting Bri.  At 4x6, 6x9, or 8x12 the photo is fine, but at 8x10 the ends get clipped.  That was just dumb on my part... to produce an unclipped 8x10 print some edits would be required.

All that said, I am really pleased with how the resulting image came out.  And more importantly, my beloved friends Brian and Lynnea are happy with it, which is really what this was all about.  Doing something nice for people I hold very dear in my heart.

Love you guys, glad you liked the photo!

Here's a funny animation I caught on Pharyngula, the excellent science blog by P.Z. Myers.  The audio is German, but there are subtitles.  I got a kick out of it, perhaps you will too?

Das Rad

Back in the ides of December my niece Samantha had a big day.  She performed in a Christmas-themed dance recital with her dance troupe and then went home to have a birthday party.  After the party she went back to the stage for an encore performance with her troupe.  It was an important day for her and she was really keyed up, but did an excellent job during her numbers onstage.  Way to go Sam!

My sister-in-law Kris, Sam's mom, asked me to come to the recital and party to take pictures.  I packed some equipment up and made the long trip with equal shares of nerves and anticipation.  During the trip down Kris phoned me and let me know that the director of the show wasn't keen on photographs being made.  There could be no flash, and I could not stand close to the stage--she was concerned I would distract the dancers and block the views of the other patrons, which doesn't give me much credit but I could understand her concerns.  More annoying was that I would not be able to use a tripod (so as not to be distracting).

So the tripod stayed in the car and my nerves got worse.  How dark would it be?  Would I be able to shoot anything decent at all?  Would Kris be disappointed?

The answer to the first question was pitch black.  The stage was lit dimly but the room was black as black could be.  I went over my lens options and eventually settled on the EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS.  I had both the 35mm 1.4L and 85mm 1.2L with me, but I was nervous about confining myself to fixed focal lengths given the admonitions I had received--I didn't want to be moving around a lot.  Fortunately I spotted a place to the side of the auditorium where I would be out of the aisle and not blocking anyone.  I asked the person collecting tickets if I could stand there quietly and shoot and she said "I don't see why not."

So I cranked my ISO wayyy up (most shots at 1250 or 1600, a few at 1000) and took a boatload of shots.  The angle was less than ideal.  I really needed to be in the center aisle (and on a tripod!)  Despite all this I managed to snag a few dozen really great shots (IMHO).  Choosing the zoom was definitely the right idea... it gave me a lot of needed flexibility.

Afterward I got to meet the show's director and the first thing she said to me was "Was that you taking pictures out there with the flash?"  I assured her that was someone else and pointed out there was no flash on the camera.  Then I offered to get her copies of the pictures and she seemed agreeable.

Then the 70-200mm came off and the 85mm went on for portraits of Sam at the venue where the show was held.  Then it was back to her house for her birthday party where I shot over a hundred pix of her and her friends, using both the 85mm and the 35mm primes.

During the following week in rare free moments, I post processed the photos heavily in lightroom and photoshop, and prepared a CD for both my sister in law, and the dance troupe director.  The CDs included my business card and a text file discussing the shoot.  Hopefully the dance theatre director will be pleased with the shots and decide to contract me for future work.  That would be nice!!  I did hear back that Kris *loved* the pictures, and that she gave her permission for me to share pictures of Sam on flickr, and on my business website (which very much bare and under construction), and that definitely warmed the cockles of my heart.

Sadly I don't have permission from the parents of the other kids at Sam's party, or the other dancers during her show, so I am limited to sharing just pictures of Samantha, but that's okay, in my eyes she really was the star of the day.  I suspect if you check out the photos you'll agree.  Click the image above to check out the photoset in my flickr photostream.

Happy 11'th birthday Sam, and bravo for a terrific show!