Have you been watching “Galavant”? It’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever seen, but I’ve been enjoying it enough to keep watching it. I can envision the songs popping up at lots of high school talent shows.
Without further ado: Here’s our menu plan for the week.
Monday: Cheeseburgers
We’re going to check out another kids-eat-free night!
Tuesday: Sizzling Rice Soup
My mom is going to be visiting, and she’s requested another go at sizzling rice soup.
Wednesday: Spaghetti
I thought I had spaghetti makings on hand when I made my menu plan. I still haven’t checked to see whether or not I was right.
Thursday: Festival of Frozens
This is that thing where we go to Trader Joe’s and we all pick out an individual frozen entree.
I knew Poppy was going to spend a few days with her grandparents this week, but I neglected to send any schoolwork with her. At the rate we’ve been missing days lately, this school year will last ’til mid-June.
Monday
Poppy spent Monday with her grandparents, and most of the stuff she and Pete do on Mondays is together-work. So we took the day off.
Tuesday
Poppy got home on Tuesday. It was pretty late in the day, though, so we took Tuesday off, too. (This was not the plan.)
Wednesday
It was the one and only day that we actually completed all of our assigned tasks!
Thursday
The kids started a couple of outsourced classes — drama and US history — on Thursday. The classes take a good part of the day, so our Thursday schedule at home is pretty light. And yesterday it was especially light, because we were busy with other things as well. By the time we got home we were all ready to have a break, and suddenly we were ordering pizza and watching “The Great Mouse Detective.”
I think next week we’re going to try to get a few things done before we leave for class. That’ll require me to get up when the alarm goes off, though.
Friday
We don’t have any outings planned, so hopefully we’ll be more on the ball today.
The second 52Frames assignment was Silhouette. I had an idea of what I wanted to do, but I wasn’t sure exactly how to achieve it so I took a couple of Pete’s action figures outside to play around with the camera and try to figure out what I was doing. The Yoda picture above the post title turned out wildly out of focus, but I liked it anyway. He’s so mighty and dignified for such a little guy.
The first picture I took was of my old standby model, Marsha T. Cat. She was sitting in the window and the light was coming in just-so. It was an opportunistic moment that wasn’t quite what I wanted it to be. Later, at the playground, the swingset seemed like a good place to nab a silhouette photo. The large tree and the power lines made the background a little too busy, though.
After goofing around for a few days with no guidance, I decided to do some technique research. I found a few good, helpful articles on capturing silhouettes:
Even with those tips, though, I couldn’t get the contrast as sharp as I wanted it to be. The “extra credit” option for this week was to do the picture using only artificial light, and it occurred to me when Pete was playing “Disney Infinity” that I might be able to use the light from the TV to capture his silhouette. Alas, he is very wiggly and our TV is on the small side and so that plan didn’t work out so well. It did, however, lead me to the idea to use light from my laptop.
I’ve seen lots of beautiful, sunset-backed silhouette pictures, and they made me want something bright and colorful as backdrop. I looked through some of Paul Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings and eventually picked “Les Montagnes Tahitiennes.” I posed one of Pete’s “Infinity” characters in front of it — it should be pretty clear which one it was — and viola! “L’Art de Canard et ‘Les Montagnes’ ” was born.
52Frames week 2: Silhouette. “L’Art de Canard avec ‘Les Montagnes’ “
My eldest nephew got a new camera for Christmas, and he’s going to be taking a photography class this semester. He isn’t officially participating in the 52Frames challenge, but he’s going to try out a couple of the assignments along the way. Here’s his take on the silhouette:
