Before we left for vacation in Virginia, Jes and I had decided that we would start a post weekend run tradition of bringing Marble to Caribou with us and writing our blog post. Obviously that plan has changed, but this morning we were finally able to go for another run, and I am writing this post from Caribou. The run without Marble was more difficult that I anticipated it would be because that was the one thing that was truly Marble’s. Without her, we may or may not have done a lot of stuff we ended up doing, but weekend run’s were all about Marble. Trying to get back on the running trail was difficult, but something we both knew we needed to do, and we felt her presence every step of the way. The idea behind Caribou afterwards was to help socialize her after she had gotten tired, but Radar certainly could use some work in that arena, so he is laying at my feet right now. And I do mean laying. I’m not sure what has gotten into him, perhaps it is that we started training him in earnest, but this is the most well behaved he has even been in public.
Other than trying to get back on the running horse, Jes and I are taking photography classes. Even though the material is aimed at people that have never held anything other than a point and shoot, I am learning a good deal. And even better (for me anyway) is that it has gotten Jes interested in photography. Last week’s assignment was to play around with ISO (which affects image quality) and white balance (which affects the overall color of the image) in both indoors and outdoor settings. The idea was to make sure everyone in the class was able to properly identify a correct white balance vs. an image with an incorrect white balance.
While I’ve always been able to tell when an image had an incorrect white balance, I’ve never been able to tell what exactly was wrong with it. Yesterday we got to look at everyone’s homework and by the end of the exercise we were both able to easily identify not only an incorrect white balance, but what would need to happen in order to fix it. This week’s assignment focuses on shutter speed and how to either freeze or capture motion in an image.
Saving the best news for last – Ron and Kate asked us to be Oliver’s Godparents this week!!! I can’t tell you how honored and excited we both are by this. I’ve been best man in a wedding twice, which was a big deal, but pales in comparison to this. I doubt I will ever be able to fully express in words just how much of a compliment we think this is and can’t wait to help raise the little tyke. It will certainly help that in about 6 months we will live a quarter of a mile away – and we plan on exploiting that as much as we can.
