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I’ll see you over at the new place.

We hosted a Thanksgiving feast for Gina’s parents, my Dad and my Grandma, the star of an earlier post. I used a brining recipe from Alton Brown of Good Eats fame and it turned out marvelous. It was the third or fourth time I’ve brined a turkey and it’s the only way to go. In my experience, roasted turkey is generally dry and unappealing. With the brining method the juices flow out of the bird like the Nile River when you hit it with the electric knife.

Using a technique I learned from the Strobist. I put my Vivitar 285HV on a light stand in one corner (behind the camera in this photo) and in the opposite corner nestled my SB 26 in a huge coffee mug sitting on a knick-knack shelf. Both flashes were set at 1/2 power and pointed at the ceiling. My D90 was set at 160th, f/9 and 400 ISO. The camera fired the Vivitar via poverty wizard and the SB 26 fired via optical slave. The intent was to get some nice even light from the flashes bounced off the ceiling. I got my initial exposure based on the ambient coming through a large window. That way when the window got into a frame it wouldn’t be a blown-out white square. And then I set the flash power by firing a few frames and chimping the LCD.

This setup worked pretty well, but the dining room is painted a kind of flourescent brown and the light bouncing around in there lent a brownish-red cast to everything. (Check out my face above.) I was able to correct some of that in Photoshop.

The food was excellent, thanks to Gina’s two days’ of hard work. The only blemish was my inability to find any Kraft garlic cheese to make my world-famous Uncle Slappy’s Shut Yo’ Mouth Cheese Grits. A Wal-Mart employee said they stopped carrying it last summer and a worker at Harp’s said Kraft quit making it. A little research revealed the bitter truth. And I’m not the only one upset about it. Though edible, the cheese grits disappointed.

Not much was left at the end of the day.

I got a package in the mail that had a huge wad of shredded newspaper inside as packing material and when Abby found it she went nutsy fagan.

I shot these with my 50mm f/1.8 prime at f/4.5 and 1/30. I left the auto ISO on and it jumped around quite a bit. These two shots were at 2200 and 1600 ISO, respectively. We were in the kitchen under the funky flourescent lights, which made the white balance weird in the top photo because the light behind Abby is a different temperature than the light shining on her face. I had to play around with it in Photoshop quite a bit to get it close. I ended up just concentrating on getting her face right and just letting the rest go. That’s why her hair and counter top at the top left are kinda blue-purple.

I was shooting some pics of Abby in the light from the living room window when she picked up these black shoes and worked real hard at putting them on. She got finished and looked down at them and I asked her, “How do they look?” She said, “They look wrong.” I replied, “That’s because they’re on the wrong feet.” So she took them off and ran into the other room to see what her mom was doing.

I can’t get her to ham it up for the camera. This is the look she generally gives me when she notices I’m taking pictures.

I set out Saturday for the third weekend in a row looking for some fabulous fall foliage. I failed. In the hope that the leaves down south were still in peak form, I headed down to the Cossatot Falls State Park. As I headed down I-540, I could see the leaves in Northwest Arkansas were about done. I was hoping the foliage would get better the farther south I traveled on Highway 71. I was disappointed. Plus, the area I went to might not be the best for fall color anyway. The area is mostly timber company land planted in pine trees. The little swirly parts in the photo become raging whitewater holes when the river comes blasting through after heavy rains. The river is typically low in the fall. On Saturday, you could have easily waded across without a problem. Cossatot is supposedly an Indian word that means skull crusher. They say this is the most challenging whitewater in Arkansas.

When I was growing up in Texarkana, we used to go up to the falls and swim in the summer. That was way before it was a state park. The holes are body surfable when the water is low. One in particular — it might be the infamous Washing Machine, I don’t really know — has a channel that flows crossways and a scoop at the end that will throw you downstream. (After looking at some pics on the Web, I think the photo above is the Washing Machine.) One time I was swimming there with my Dad (and maybe a friend of mine, I can’t really remember). The water was a touch higher than optimum and I came washing down and made the scoop and the water pinned me to the bottom for a little bit. It kinda scared the crap out of me as I recall. My cousin Dale is a kayaker and he told me that one time he flipped in one of the holes and water pinned him down so good he had to scoot along on his back on the bottom until he washed out.

This whole area is one giant fantastic rock formation from the water action.

I finally located the leaves on my hike back to the truck.

Before I hit the falls, I went over to the visitor center at the Highway 278 bridge. There’s an old low-water bridge below the big highway bridge. I hadn’t been to this spot in probably 20 years. The visitor center wasn’t there then and the road down to the river bed wasn’t nearly as smooth as it is now. The area is full of picnic tables and charcoal grills. You probably even have to pay to camp there now. The old road that went down the river bank was blocked off and turned into a hiking trail.

When I was 15 or 16, my Dad and a couple uncles and a few cousins set off on a float trip in john boats from the Highway 246 bridge down to the Highway 278 (it was state Highway 4 then). The river was a lot higher than we realized. I remember going over the Ed Banks low-water bridge without even noticing and my uncle saying in surprise, “That’s the Ed Banks Bridge.” We beat those boats all to hell. And we skipped the falls section. The sign in the photo made me laugh because there used to be a rope swing in one of the cottonwood trees on the bank. Maybe even the one in the background of the photo.

It wasn’t really a wasted Saturday.

We had planned to go for a drive in the Buffalo River area Sunday to see the leaves, but Abby got sick and Gina felt a 103 degree fever was not conducive to viewing fall foliage. Gina cut me loose for the afternoon and I headed out by myself.

I drove to Ponca and bought a map of the hiking trails in the western part of the national river park. Parking at the Ponca access to the river, I took off east on the Old River Road Trail, which I had never been on before. The scenery in he Buffalo River bottom is always nice, but the fall foliage seemed to be past peak down there. I bet the trees along the river in the top photo were afire in red and yellow a week ago. That would have made a better picture, of course.

I passed a couple of nice bluffs in the mile or so I traveled on the trail.

The map showed the trail curling back up a draw into some higher terrain and that’s where I wanted to go. Eventually I came out on a huge gravel bar and the trail petered out. If I had studied the map better, I would have noticed the little spur trail that led out along the river before ending. I had missed the fork in the trail and on the way back I discovered why. The sign is way back in the cane and is impossible to see if your headed east, unless you’re walking backward. And the trail fork itself is pretty faint. In addition, I didn’t know the trail split at all so I wasn’t watching for it. Let that be a warning to you if you head that way.

I wasn’t really happy with any of the photos and I think I learned a lesson. I didn’t have much time before dark, and I was intent on covering ground to see as much as possible. Thinking back on it, I could have stopped in any one of dozens of areas and really searched for things to photograph. Instead, I just did drive-bys as I cruised through the woods going nowhere. A day earlier, my Dad and I watched the sunrise from one spot overlooking the Kings River and I got several shots I liked. We didn’t move out of about a 500-square-foot area.

A couple months ago when I went to check out Eagles Nest Falls in the Madison County Wildlife Management Area I found this magnificent view of the Kings River valley. I made a mental note to try to get back there to see the fall foliage at sunrise. I figured this Saturday would be perfect because the switch back to standard time on Sunday would make sunrise come earlier and make it less likely I would be able to get there early enough. (I realize that sunrise happens when it happens and we humans are the ones who put a time to it. But these are mental gymnastics I used to convince myself that rising at 5 a.m. was a good idea.) My dad was in town and he’s always up way too early and he enjoys a good hike, so he was game to go along with my idea.

We got there about 30 minutes before the sun popped over the horizon, but fog covered the valley and hid most of the color in the trees below. That was kind of a bummer, but the scene was still beautiful.

I’ve been meaning to try the Strobist portrait technique of shooting with the sunset as a backdrop and using a flash on the subject. This sunrise presented the opportunity but I didn’t bring any of my flash gear with me so I had to use the pop-up flash on the camera. I got the ambient exposure and then I walked up the flash manually until I got the right exposure on dear old dad. I think the flash was on 1/2 power. I was surprised the pop-up worked so well.

I made this pano shot using the photomerge feature in Photoshop. I don’t have one of those fancy pano tripods so the resulting picture was kinda hinky on the left side and I cropped off about a quarter of the shot. You need to click this one to see it bigger and get the full effect, such as it is.

Click for larger size.

What with it being Halloween and all, we embarked on some punkin’ carvin’. Abby helped scoop out the innards.

And Gina drew the face of the jack-o-lantern.

And I put my vampire teeth in and did the carvin’. Strobist: Vivitar 285HV inside jack-o-lantern on 1/64 with a white washcloth strapped to front as diffuser. SB-26 camera right with DIY grid on 1/32 to light front of jack-o-lantern. Fired by poverty wizard on Vivitar and optical slave on SB-26. I put a piece of wax paper over the inside to cover the mouth and eyes. It provided some extra diffusion and hid the flash, which was visible through the mouth. Gina pulled the trigger on the camera.

Abby was looking pretty cute right after her bath today, so I dragged out my Strobist gear to try some on-axis fill flash. I set up my 45 inch Westcott reflective silver umbrella with the SB-26 on 1/2 power and for the on-axis fill used my SB-400 covered with a plastic Country Time Lemonade container over it as a diffuser. (The lemonade now resides in a Zip-Loc bag in a kitchen cabinet.) The point is to throw some light to soften the shadows created by the main light. Now, David Hobby uses a ring light as his on-axis flash. I don’t have a ring light. I’m not even sure I know what a ring light is. I had to make do with my DIY rig.

I think I was supposed to use a hard light source as the key light. Maybe just the bare flash without the umbrella. Oh well, I think they turned out pretty nice. I did do the hard light thing for the next pic.

The shoe set-up I just flat stole from the Strobist. Abby has pounded some pavement with these shoes with the bling on top. I have been wanting to take a few pics of them just to have as a reminder of the stuff she had when she was a toddler, but I wasn’t very inspired as to how to go about it. Then the Strobist posted a description of how he shot some shoes and I thought I’d give it a try. My set-up was the SB-26 gridded at camera right at 1/64 power and the SB-400 Country Time Lemonade special on the camera, f/11. The more I look at this one, the more I like it. The shoes almost look 3D.

Since I was at my parents’ house in the middle of nowhere Kansas this weekend, I thought it prudent to try a star trails shot with the new camera. Star trails by themselves are pretty cool, but it’s the foreground that usually makes such shots really cool. The best thing I could find nearby were some hay bales.

Though I was really pretty far out in the country, the house has a big street light in the yard and there’s a church about 300 yards from the house with its own big street light. In addition, the small town of Parsons is about five miles away. It was actually hard to find a suitably dark piece of sky without a big street light in the way. Straight up was nice with a ton of stars, but I couldn’t get anything in the foreground with the camera pointed straight up.

What I ended up with was the hay bales with the lights of town behind them and the big light from the church shining on their fronts. That’s why they are that green color. I guess the light was florescent or sodium vapor or something. I shot on daylight white balance in raw and I tweaked it a little in CS3. Exposure was f/10 for about 30 minutes.