Do Not Cross

Cheri and I went to the Crafty Bastards Arts and Crafts Fair in Silver Spring, MD on Saturday. This was a self-described alternative craft fair featuring young hipsters selling their unique (and sometimes cliched) designs. There was jewelery made from typewriter keys, blown glass, nails, and bolts. There were disturbing children’s and pet toys. There were ironic t-shirts, trendy belts, and punk-rock baby clothes. In a nutshell, you weren’t going to find your grandmother’s crocheted sweaters here.

Along with the crafts, there was live music, mustache painting, and craft workshops going on as well. It was fun to window shop the different vendors and their items. At times it felt that I wasn’t artsy or ironic enough to fit in, but oh well. I still had fun taking a few pictures and window shopping at some of the cool items. A couple things we got were some glass coasters and some earrings for Cheri (both made by the same artist).

I just found out this morning that 2 Skinnee J’s will be playing a reunion show at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC on Wednesday, August 6th. Tickets go on sale tomorrow (6/19) at 10 am online at the 9:30 Club’s website. Cheri and I will definitely be in attendance. If you never witnessed the phenomenal awesomeness of 2 Skinnee J’s then I suggest you seek out some of their videos on YouTube.

Ever since my graduation, I’ve been taking lots of photos with my new Nikon D80. Here are some highlights from our recent camping trip to Heavenly Acres in Greene County, Virginia:

This is a shot of the South River in Greene County, Virginia. We were out there camping and we stumbled across this small river while looking for some good places for pictures. I shot this in manual mode at 90 mm, 1/3 sec SS, f/22, ISO 100. I used my tripod and the time delay setting to avoid shaking the camera while taking the long exposure. I also took this at dusk so that the image didn’t over expose. I made sure to use a small aperture to allow for a large depth of field.

While we were driving around, my father-in-law’s GPS indicated we were near Greene Acres Lake. What we found was this. For this shot, I used manual at 55 mm, 1.3 sec SS, f/18, and ISO 100. Since this was at dusk and I used a long shutter speed, I set the camera on my tripod and used the time delay to avoid any shaking. The small aperture allowed me to get most of the photo in focus.

This picture was taken at Big Meadows in the Shenandoah National Park. For this photo, I used shutter priority mode at 200 mm, 1/200 sec SS, f/29, and ISO 400. In order to get the silhouette of the tree I made sure to meter for the sky. I did this by aiming at the sky (with no tree or ground in view), pressed halfway down on my shutter button to determine the needed settings, then aimed down to get the tree and ground in view. This allowed the camera to get the sky exposed correctly while underexposing the ground to give me that silhouette.

While we were on a trail that paralleled the Rapidan River, I stumbled across an area that had a lot of bumblebees and other bugs flying around. So I crouched down, set my camera to shutter priority with a very high shutter speed (to try to freeze the motion of the flying insects), and set my camera to burst mode (to keep taking pictures as I held the shutter button down). This was one of the few shots that came out. Here I used (like I said) shutter priority, 200 mm, 1/2000 sec SS, f/8, and ISO 400. Since it was a bright day out, I also had my exposure compensation dial set to -2.

You can see the rest of the photos from our camping trip on my flickr page.

If you are on Facebook (groan), then you can get five (yes, count ‘em, five) free songs from iTunes. Here’s how you do it:

1. Log in (duh).
2. Go to the group for Ticketmaster Live.
3. Join the group.

When you join, you will be given a redeem code good for five free songs from the iTunes music store (as long as the song costs between $0.99 and $1.29). The redeem code must be used by December 31st, 2007 for it to work.

I learned this from Neatorama, so I give them all the credit!