Scattered Thoughts . . .

A s I was sitting on the couch this evening, looking out the living room window toward our trash shed, the color difference between the old incandescent Christmas lights and the new LED "warm white" Christmas lights was abundantly obvious.  I said to myself, "I'll have to get a photo of that soon..." but quickly decided that "soon" should be "immediately".   First, I grabbed my Sony a6000 camera body and shot a few photos but, honestly, I wasn't too impressed with the photo quality.  This was partially due to using a relatively slow lens at f4 in the dark so the camera used a very high ISO value making the image a bit too noisy and splotchy for my taste.  Usually, when using this camera, I would choose a faster lens in the f1.8-2.8 range but I had the f4 lens already mounted on the body so I figured I would use that one.  I was hoping that I could counter the relatively slow lens (slower lenses struggle more in low light) by using a feat

E very now and then, I have prints made of some of my photos.  I've been wanting to see how images shot with my little classic Fuji camera look in print so I had a few of those images printed as you can see in the photo, below.    Since my health has been exceptionally lousy this year and it was a consistently rainy and smoky summer, I haven't had much of a chance to shoot with this camera as often as I would like.  Actually, I haven't been able to do much beyond things I absolutely had to do, rain or not.  That being said, I have captured a few photos with this camera that I really like so I had these images printed professionally. The prints are looking nice!  I feel that the paper the printer used could be heavier but the prints do look nice.  This particular printer recently made some changes to how they print their high end prints so maybe I'll need to find a new printer. Having prints made of photos I view on a backlit monitor is tough.  The monitor must be calibr

The other day (the day after Thanksgiving), we started putting up all the Christmas decorations inside the house.  I put the tree up and then starting pulling out strings of Christmas lights.  I quickly realized that most of last year's lights were no longer lighting up. I spent too much time troubleshooting each string yet I was still unable to fix any of the faulty strings.  We decided that perhaps this is the year to start replacing our old incandescent Christmas lights with LED Christmas lights.   I've been putting off making this switch to LEDs for two reasons.  First, the first few years of LEDs were only available in cool white which emitted a color somewhere between blue and cool white.  Those were a sickly color of blue and I didn't want my Christmas lights looking like that.  The other reason for putting off this switch to LEDs was the ridiculously high price.  Those early strings of LEDs were far too expensive. This year, I had no problems finding more appropriat