Corn and Cardinals

This past week has been quite the interesting week. I welcomed today with open arms as it was a day off for me. Up to that point i had worked 7 of the last 8 days which was totally cramping my style of trying to follow Dr. Jones methodology. It never ceases to amaze me how your day off seems to fly by but the ole work days crawl by at a snails trot. All in all life has been good though and i'm back on my normal schedule. The last week has also brought us into the corn making business. Wenge finally revealed the true caramel corn recipe and we have already made a few batches. I will have to say that it is delicious and pretty easy to make. Granted that its just one more thing that is gonna hold me back from losing the 10-15 lbs that i need/want to lose. I have shared a picture of our yummy goodness as it was basking in the warm oven's sun. There has been one other creature that has made a glorious appearance to the Heady Estate over the last week or so. Over the summer we added a hummingbird feeder and a regular bird feeder. We had pretty good success but over the last week we have changed our feed to Black oil sunflower seed and have seen a 100% increase in our Cardinal population. We rarely ever saw one on the other feed but now we have a large Cardinal Sanctuary. After seeing the numerous beautiful creatures in our back yard, i began to see the world in pictures again and drummed up the idea to get another bird feeder to place outside the front window. With the new front window setup i have the Nikon D50 perched on its tripod and pointed right at the bird house with the hopes with the little camera remote that we will catch some great pics to post on the web. Only a few hours in operation we had our first visitors but it was already starting to get dark and was not able to get a good picture. As always, I can never just have one opportunity at a good shot so i have added another hummingbird feeder along with a Finch feeder to hang on the same pole as the new bird house. Check back in a few days and hopefully you will see one of our pictures from our new bird window.

Sarah BB game...

Tonight was lesson one in photographing basketball for ole man Heady . Like alot of things in life you learn as you go and tonight shooting pictures was no different. It was my first indoors low light test with my lense and as far as lighting goes i have no complaints. I pulled out the big zoom lense and right away noticed a big difference in being able to focus and not get dark pictures. Just looking at the pics on the computer tonight i have already learned a few things that will hopefully make future pics better. My little sister Sarah played pretty well tonight like all the nights we have seen her play. Unfortunately her team just never seems to put it all together while we are there. Sarah had 5 threes tonight but it could have been more like 8-9. she had a few just rim out. Out of the teams 38 or so points she had 15 so i would say that is pretty stout. Like always if she ever wants to see someone rain down some threes and put her in her place she can just come knock on ole C. Heady's door. hahah i will have to give it to her she is pretty deadly from behind the three and if she doesn't hit the three she might just hit you in the eye. She is pretty intense and quite often can be seen burning a hole thru someone with her cutting looks. All in all it was a fun night. Like all photographers there is comfort in numbers and i shot prob about 150 shot tonight to turn out with a few good ones. I will share a few here and you can catch some more at our flicker page. Have a good week.

Happy New Year! First post of 2008

Greetings to all you loyal and faithful readers. I will echo the cries of other fellow bloggers that the Holiday Season brings a new degree of difficulty to blogging. But hey i'm not gonna ride that excuse hah. Christmas was great once again. Once again just another reminder of how blessed we truly are. Even though this year was a little different with Me and Tara taking a journey to NC it was all good. We had a great few days with Tara's family and getting to meet the Newest whittaker was pretty cool. he is a cutie. We had both her mom and dads Christmas gatherings on Christmas Eve and then we set sail around 9 oclock Sparta time setting a blazing trail towards TN. About 20 Miles into the 340 mi adventure i was having my doubts. I 'm not sure i have ever been more tired in my life but like all good running backs and race horses i got stronger as the night wore on. By the end it was just me and andrew peterson rocking down the road till we finally arrived at about 2am at Nanny's house. I had never drove at the wee hours of the morning on Christmas but it was pretty wild to see what other people are doing. Random bonfires by the house, late night bar crowds and the occasional random drivers. Christmas morning found us with the traditional breakfast and then just chilling out the rest of the day till daddys party that night. Our Christmas was concluded with Mom's gathering on Wednesday night at her house which was also a Celebration of Sarahs 16th Birthday. Since that time i have found myself playing with new little gadgets and working like a borrowed mule. This year i find myself on the bottom of the ladder and with 3 other providers that want to take time off around the Holiday...that left good ole Cam to fill in those days. All in all it has been good and I will never turn down a pay check. Tara has also entered the work force where she is working for the local phone company while one of the regular employees is on medical leave. Now that she has hit the gold maybe i can cut my schedule farther back to reflect my friend Mr. Jones schedule. The last few days i have found myself toying with something that i bought for myself after the Christmas holiday. I have really grown to love photography and playing with all the different settings to see what i can come up with. Not really sure where this hobby came from but its one that is pretty neat once you get into it. Over the last few months i have found myself learning some of the technical blab that is associated with photography. My recent purchases was a little Nikon 50mm f/1.8 lens. Photography is much like alot of other hobbies The more money you have brings more little bells and whistles you can put to use. Well unfortunately i don't have alot of money to throw around but this one i couldn't resist at just over 100 bucks. Its neither the latest nor the best but it has some great potential. All readers other than Bignate will have probably checked out by now but i will explain whats so fun about this little jewel. Even though its a 50mm lense, with the new DSLR digital sensor it essentially has a 1.5x crop factor that makes it the equivalent to a 75-80mm lens. I now have 3 lens which all cover the 70mm range at some point on their spectrum. The lense 28-80mm, 70-300mm zoom and now this 50mm (=75mm). Each one has its limits and one of them is called the fstop or how big the hole in the lense gets that lets light come thru. My new lens goes down to f/1.8 where all my other lens at that same focal length were prob 4-4.5. Which
really just means its alot faster and works better in low light. here is a little test i did to show you the difference with 3 lens all set at the same exact settings (as close as i could get on focal length) but oh look at the results. I hope you enjoy. first pic is with 70-300 zoom lense. then my new lens in the middle and last pic is with 28-80mm lens. As you can tell lighting is quite different. This makes it a great indoor lens when you don't want to use a flash or if you do just a good fast lens even though its not a zoom lens. hope you enjoyed! have a great day.