I finished my last exam for the semester - yay! Now I get to be sociable for 4 whole weeks! I've been pretty unsociable for a while. Between losing Joshua (it's been nearly 10 months can you believe!), preparing for surgery, recovering from surgery, then getting back into study and life in general, I haven't done very well at catching up with friends or replying to emails.
Now I can try to do both those things, plus get back into regular fitness (it's been very sporadic), read a backlog of books and do some more cooking and baking (anyone got any requests?).
There's two more things I'm looking at doing. The first is training to become a National Disaster Animal Response Team volunteer - it's run through the Humane Society of the United States, and it's a group of trained volunteers they can call on to help out when national disasters hit (floods, earthquakes, fires etc). The volunteers help evacuate the animals, provide emergency sheltering, track down owners, and generally be the animal version of the Red Cross type groups.
The other is getting some "studio" equipment for our Nikon D80 to do portrait photography. I need to get a Speedlight (external flash), stand for the speedlight, a background, and something to hold up the background, and I guess maybe an umbrella for diffusing light, and will start off with doing kids and pets for friends - just as a hobby. If anyone has any recommendations for equipment, I'd love to hear it!
I think my 4 weeks "break" will go fast!
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Ahhhh on holidays
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2 comments:
Sarah, I'd strongly recommend looking at the Strobist kits from Midwest Photo Exchange. I ordered three kits (the Strobist Wireless kits, specifically) for a friend and she is absolutely loving them.
Some points to note:
- shoot-through (white) umbrellas work far better with small strobes than reflective umbrellas. You can get them much closer to the subject (= lower flash power = faster flash recycling) without struggling to keep them out of the photo -- a problem with reflective umbrellas
- Read Strobist's Lighting 101, you can download it as a PDF and print it, which is nice
- The Cactus remotes (as in the Strobist SW kits) work but occasionally exhibit some weird problems at high flash sync speeds (1/200th sec or faster). If you want something better at not-PocketWizard-price, have a look back through some recent posts on the Strobist blog, there was an announcement about a new wireless flash trigger system recently
Feel free to email me if you have any questions. I used to work with Andrew, in case you were wondering :-)
Wow - now I know where to look if I ever do portrait photography!
Thanks, my favourite is ginger slice, closely followed by meringue pie :)
Those volunteers would be working hard with all the fires going on right now.
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