Speaking of disconnected, this post is all about covering a few things that don’t fit anywhere else.

1. I cut my daughter’s hair last week and immediately felt the heart-pangs of regret. First, I’m not good at cutting hair – I should have taken her somewhere. Second, I removed far more of her precious baby hair than I intended. And third, she looks SO terribly grown up.

haircut by fire

but she LOVES it!

I tell my kids, after a hair cut, that the best thing about hair is that it grows. Sort of like renewed mercy. There is always hope.

My son desperately needs a hair cut and is actually begging me to do it. Do I dare?!

2. I promised last week that I would post my experiments with a free trial download of Adobe Lightroom. The “free” part is dangerous, and Adobe knows this. It’s how I ended up buying Photoshop a couple years ago (after downloading the free 30-day trial of Photoshop Elements, followed by another 30-day trial of the full version).

I ran out of time to do anything post-worthy, and I have a LONG way to go to fully explore this software. But this blog is all about keeping me going with learning something new. A promise is a promise, so here’s a first super-quick try with an admittedly poor photo:

running out of time

If I decide I need to add Lightroom to the arsenal, I have less than six months (yay!) to take advantage of the huge student/faculty discount.

3. I also promised I would post my experiments with shooting fully manual. It’s really fairly easy to change the camera settings, and it’s nice to have full control.

window wishing

It’s not so easy to monitor the exposure myself all the time. I was rapidly checking the exposure and trying to change settings while keeping the autofocus on a child who had moved already since I last checked the exposure. (This is why I chose my most quiet child as the subject.) If I had known photography was an active sport requiring the use of my reflexes, I would have reconsidered it as a hobby!

Next week I’ll be covering soup can alphabetization, via mental imagery. 😉

4. I got up early this morning and got better at manual shooting (part of the reason I posted so late this morning). I discovered that I can see the exposure meter and settings in the viewfinder, making it much easier to change settings quickly. This is SOOC (straight out of camera) from this morning. Kinda cool…

setting moon at sunrise

I’d love to get a photo like this with a silhouette of one of the horses. But if you click on this picture and look really, really closely in the lower LH corner, you can see our miniature goat, Cream! Coffee is there, too, but he’s too black to see.

Edited: Here they are! 🙂

Coffee & Cream in moonlight