Glassware, fog, snow, and vomit

Friday saw a trip to the Austin Community College Northridge studio where I got some good lessons in measuring lighting, setting up a light, and creating some artsy photos with glassware, water, and food dye. Using a proper (and really expensive) light meter made the whole process so much easier. It's amazing how "off" a camera's in-built light meter can be in a controlled environment. I also learned WHY it can be off in a controlled environment, and in the interest of not boring all involved, I'll skip past that.

Here's one pic I got out of it. Turns out, a lot of "the look" does come down to post-processing, which is encouraging, especially now that I know how to recreate it.

Saturday morning saw fog driving up with Terri and Joe, stuffed in my MINI, to Dallas. The further North we got, the more foggy it became. And the more snowy it became. Not in the form of falling precipitation, but as fallen precipitation. The lawns of Richardson were covered in the fluffy stuff. Enough that the high school football field had a few 5-ft plus behemoths. Terri and Sandy did a lot of cooking (I helped where I could) for the family dinner for Lunar New Year, which was delicious. So much food, which led to so many leftovers which will last a few days.

Here is a picture of the fog and snow:

Then, the vomit.

Tyler got some sort of bug, which involved vomiting quite a lot, something like four times overnight. For the continuation of Lunar New Year, we got some dim sum with dad, Andrew, Koens, Knotts, and Chius. With most of the meal eaten, Tyler coughed, spluttered, and let loose a good fountain of sick. Truly a sight to behold. Appetites properly dashed, we headed back to the store to finish up photos. Oh yes, the photos. We are working on getting some of the parents' inventory virtualized on the website as some sort of e-commerce thing, and I am doing the product photos. Dad had a giant lightbox for the stuff, which helped. I was hoping to be able to completely white-out the backgrounds on the images, but all the tools that I know and use apparently weren't around yet in the previous version of Photoshop, so instead, I just got them looking as good as I could. They should still be useful. The images are incredibly sharp, if nothing else.

More vomit.

Monday morning, Mom left for Taiwan to attend Dr. Grandma's funeral. We helped out with a few more things, laundry, freight pickup, etc. and headed out back to Austin. And now here we are. That's the flipbook version of the weekend.