Photography Friday

This week the pictures I’m posting were all taken by my boyfriend, using the new lens he got me for Christmas. It’s a Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Camera Lens and has been great for getting nicely blurred backgrounds. It also seems like it will be really good for indoor shots since it captures a lot more light at the same shutter speed compared to my higher f-stop lenses.

100 Follower Giveaway!

Photo credit to GigaFytes

Hello all! Today marks the beginning of my 100 follower giveaway, which will go for a week so you all have a chance to enter. The giveaway will end next Sunday at midnight and the winner will be announced Monday. Unfortunately, the giveaway is not a cat; I just thought the cat was adorable! But the giveaway is a $10 Amazon gift card, which you can sign up to enter by going to this rafflecopter widget and telling me how you follow. Thanks for following!

Photography Friday

Although I usually make a conscious effort not to have my weekly picture be of my cat (because otherwise they all would be!) this week I just couldn’t resist.  Maggie has just been so adventurous this week: climbing to the top of my fridge; making wild leaps into the top drawer of my dresser; and sleeping in all sorts of crazy places, like my dirty clothes hamper and the box she’s enjoying in the picture above.  Here I caught her sleeping on her back and then watching me try to get a bright enough picture.  I think she was laughing at me!

Bookends – The Week With All the Cats

Despite being in the lab so much this week, I did have some time to read, mostly while waiting on reactions to happen.  So I decided to finish the alarmingly large pile of cat books I picked up while reading in the 636’s and for bookends this week I’ll be giving a brief review of each of them.

Photography Friday

You know it’s been a busy week when you’re spending your Friday night taking pictures of your shower curtain because that’s really just all the excitement you can handle.  Well, that and the fact that this is the first chance I’ve had all week to even think about pictures.  Another busy week in the lab, the sort of week which has caused the boy to start telling his family that I’m doing “mad scientist stuff” and possibly “making zombie e. coli” (the second part, at least, is provably untrue, while the first part is… subjective).  Anyway, back to the shower curtain.  A while back, I took a picture of my shower curtain as part of my first few fumbling attempts at abstracts for the Ames Camera Club competition.  But the lighting was all wrong, so today I decided to move my own lighting in.  Unfortunately, it seems like there may be one interesting way to take a picture of a shower curtain and I just couldn’t find it again tonight.

Fortunately, I also have an awesome picture of my cat Maggie to share or I might feel pretty sad about my picture selection this week!  She thought I was paying way too much attention to the shower curtain and wanted to play, so I decided to try to take pictures of her while playing with her. Easier said than done! First, she would grab the yarn and sit up and look fierce – until the moment I got my camera oriented for a portrait shot, when she would roll on her back and look adorable and very horizontal.  She also did her absolute best to look at the string (and therefore the camera) for the minimum amount of time possible while still holding the string.  I swear, she was laughing on the inside.  In fact, the one non-motion blurred face shot I managed to get is the one you see here, and I’m pretty sure she’s singularly unimpressed with my picture taking speed.  If she could talk, I think she’d tell me that if I was trying to catch mice, I would be utterly hopeless 🙂

My Kind of Cat

As soon as I finished reading Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, I immediately jumped into the sequel (a good sign, I think!).  And in the introduction I came across the following quote, which really represented the first book to me: “People appreciate Spencer, Iowa.  They like our cornfields and architecture and they also like what we represent: simplicity, old-fashioned hard work, but also creativity, commitment, and love.”