We are preparing to leave for Minnesota and Wisconsin tomorrow. Just outside of Luck, Wisconsin, we will continue an over three-decade-long tradition of attending the West Denmark Family Camp.
My biggest task today is taking Rusty to his “seaside resort,” the dog kennel where he will board. It is located off 
Pinkham Point Road on Great Island in Harpswell. The kennel is a family operation, and the dogs stay in an addition built on to the family home. It happened that the address was in one of the blocks we were responsible for in our recent job of canvassing for the upcoming 2010 U.S. Census. After we had confirmed the address on our handheld computer in the database, we took the opportunity to make Rusty’s reservation for the next ten days or so. As soon as we said that it was Rusty we were making the reservation for, the owner remembered him with fondness. ( He had not remembered us at all.) He claimed to remember Rusty with pleasure, so maybe his (Rusty’s) behavior as a tenant has improved since that black day in 2007when he was expelled from Doggie Daycare.
With Rusty out of the way, we should have no problem embarking nice and early (0615 hours, if we can) for the Concord bus terminal in Portland, where we will take the very
comfortable two-hour bus ride directly to Logan Airport. From there we have a non-stop three-hour flight to Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. Arriving there at the satellite Humphrey Terminal, we hop on the Minneapolis light-rail line for a brief ride to the large VA hospital at the southeastern tip of Minneapolis, near Fort Snelling on the bluff overlooking the mouth of the Minnesota River where it flows into the Mississippi.
We catch our breaths hanging around the spacious VA Hospital lobby for a little while until my cousin and his wife finish work for the day, and then we will ride with them up to Luck, where they lives on the farm our great-grandparents and their children immigrated to in the 1880s.
This post is being “prepared” using Windows Live Writer. As the title indicates, I wanted to practice inserting photos. So far, so great! This is wonderful and simple, assuming things look as they do now after I upload to the actual blog. The photos were taken yesterday at the huge used book sale put on every year by the Friends of Curtis Memorial Library to raise money for the library. Notice the color difference? My camera lets me manipulate the “white balance,” which is actually determines the colors of the colors in a photo. In the first picture, I chose the setting for “incandescent” light, which is what I figured was being used in this school gymnasium. As I took more photos, and played around with other camera settings, I somehow inadvertently changed the white balance setting to “cloudy,” which is what many experienced photographers use for all their outdoor shots, even under sunny shooting conditions. Obviously it wasn’t a good choice for a big indoor space under old-fashioned lighting, but it does prove that choosing the correct white balance setting can make a tremendous difference in the quality of one’s digital photos. By the way, neither of these shots used flash.
1 comments:
White balance is important for us filmmakers, too. During my recent shoot for "Love, Library Style," one of my DPs inadvertently hit the white balance switch in the middle of the shoot. Luckily we caught it, but didn't realize that we had shot our only three shots of an important close-up on the wrong setting - it made that shot murkier than the rest, so I had to rethink in post.
Post a Comment