Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Yard Work!



Hammer for scale

I've been too busy for bike riding. The weather in Ohio is sunny and beautiful with temperatures in the 80's. Recent rains have the ground saturated and standing water is still prevalent in low lying areas.  The grass is turning greener by the day and is clumping up in places. It will be a waiting game till the ground dries out as far as mowing goes.

In the meantime I removed a huge 20+ year old evergreen shrub from the corner of my house.  This was the last of the evergreens that lined two sides of the house.  The bushes required trimming twice a year and over the years while I enjoyed pruning and forming the shape of the living trees like big bonsai it got to be tiresome. I can honestly say I don't mind seeing them go. My wife has done an expert job restocking the landscape with more compact shrubbery better suited to the look and size of our property.

Maintaining a house and grounds is expensive and time consuming but one can improve and upgrade all the while making the upkeep easier to deal with.


The first two pictures I took with LeeAnn's new camera. It's a Sony and does a great job.  Although my shots don't do it justice.

She wanted a camera with performance above our little point and shoot Canons without having to bust out the cumbersome SLR.  I quickly familiarized myself with it's operation and have been having a blast in auto mode.  I'm naturally skeptical of cameras manufactured by non-traditional photography related sources but this is a prejudice I'm quickly getting over. Being a fan of Sony audio equipment for years I should have realized they would be making excellent digital cameras in this day and age. 




The Sony has a larger lens and manual control which to me adds a large measure of ease and fun as well as quality to the hobby. The numbers don't mean anything to me but I do know the body has interchangeable lens and I'll be buying the 250 whatever lens for big shots in return for access to the equipment.

  The last three photographs I took with my Cannon Powershot. The little compact does a good job for a camera less than the size of a pack of cigarettes. Resting unnoticed in the pocket the canon is always at the ready when something interesting appears. Like a kilted band.

St Patrick's Day  2012  Columbus, Ohio


4 comments:

  1. Great camera! Enjoy:) I did a ton of yard work this week. I weeded the flower beds along the entire front side of the house, layed down plastic and red mulch. I also chopped up the tree house remains and took two truck loads of it to the dump! The yard is looking fantastic. It's so gratifying!

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    1. Your right Mike. Nothing better than sitting back at the end of the day and admiring your work. I really don't feel bad about missing bike time when I have some project going on in the yard.

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  2. The weather has been incredible so far. Summer is just around the corner. What editing did you do to the different photo sizes. I am not a camera guy and just use my cell phone camera at this point. You should put same size photos side by side so us laymen can tell the difference.

    Thanks for the update!

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    1. Hi Frank, I've been learning more about cameras and computers just by continuing to experiment. I usually leave the picture size setting the same on my camera and upload them to blogger. Once the pictures appear in the new post workspace I change the size using the blogger tools (when you click on the image.)

      Back to the camera- Most cameras have a low-res small size option for email attachments/ web uploads. I use that version sometimes depending on where I'm sending the pic but for blogger I use a medium size format setting on the camera to yield a bit better looking end result on my blog.

      I've recently opened a photobucket account and have been using that for other web based stuff and it works great for a noob like me. Resizing and editing is basic but very easy to get a hold of.

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