Week 7: A Project

This project was for my Grandma who owns and runs a pizza shop.  She was needing a way to advertise the Twisters that she sells.  No, not a tornado, a twister.  A twister made of ice cream.  Now that's my kind of twister!!  She asked me if I could get a picture of some of the Twisters and print it with the flavors listed on it.  I said ok, it sounded like a fun project.

 It was getting close to Valentine's Day and the restaurant was decorated with all kinds of things for the holiday.  I thought the pink and white streamers might make a good background.  During a slow break in the day my sisters and I made three Twisters and lined them up in front of the streamers for a little photoshoot.  I wanted the background blurred as much as possible to make the Twisters really stand out in the photo.  So I turned my camera to f/2.8, or somewhere around there!  I shoot in the P mode, which means I pick the exposure and the camera sets the aperture and the shutter speed.   To set the aperture to f/2.8 or so, I would choose different sets of shutter speeds/aperture ratios till I found the one I wanted.  Sounds confusing, I'm still trying to learn it myself!

After trying different angles, exposures, placement of the Twisters, and redo-ing the whipped cream on top, I finally found what worked.  I thought the end result turned out quite nicely and was worth it.  I have my sisters to thank for helping me get the pictures before the Twisters completely melted.  Not to mention getting them eaten before they melted, also!

What do you think of the end result?  Do you like Twisters?

Week 6: Roosters



 Last Spring and Summer we had quite a few chickens decide to set and hatch eggs.  After the first batch, we would take the newly hatched babies to the hen that was already raising a brood.  She eventually ended up with about twenty chicks!  We kept them in a chicken tractor (a wire cage that can be moved all over the yard to provide new grass) untill they got their actual feathers.  We then move them to the Chicken House in a dog crate overnight, just to let them see where their new house was going to be.  We then let them out in the morning with the rest of the chickens.  Usually they knew where to go to at night, but not always.  We had a few of the older chicks that stayed out at night and we had to sneak up on them once they roosted and grab them.  We then deposited them in the Chicken House for the night.  This lasted about a month, then finally we were able to get them to go to the house at night by themselves.

 

 

Quite a few of those chicks turned out to be roosters.  Here are a couple pictures of two of our roosters. 

 

 

This rooster is a golden color with darker gold turning to black in the tail area. 

 

 All of the chicks that hatched were mixed breeds, so we got some interesting looking ones!

 

 

This rooster is a Barred Rock crossed with a Buff Orpington, I think.

He has the normal Barred Rock coloring with bright orange on the midsection of his wings.

You can visit my Flickr page to see both of these pictures in color.  They are in the set called "Around the Farm"

 

We have about six other roosters.  In all we have Forty-Three chickens.

We really enjoy having the fresh eggs!  Store eggs cannot compare in taste or color!

You can immediately tell the farm eggs from the store eggs just by the color of the yolk.

In farm eggs the yolk is a dark orange, in the store eggs the yolk is a pale yellow.

 

We also have a variety in the color of the egg shells.  We have white, brown, dark brown, pale brown with darker brown spots, blue, gray-blue, green, blue-green, and an occasional dark gray-brown.  Maybe sometime I can get some pictures of the different shell colors and share them with you all.

 

Do you raise chickens/eggs?

 



Week 5: The End of January

It's the end of January.  I can't believe January 2013 has already come and gone.  Where did it go?  It seems like it has just flown by and I barely caught a glimpse of it as it passed. 

A couple of days ago it rained.  It rained hard, we even had thunder and lightning and the wind was blowing something awful.  The next day it was pretty warm, as the day went on though it cooled off quite a bit.  Then it started raining again.  The rain turned to snow, and now we have 4 inches of snow on the ground.  It is 16*F and blustery outside.  But don't worry, this weekend it is supposed to get up to 48*F again.  The weather here is crazy!  You never know what to expect!  But I am thankful for the rain and the snow.



   Hopefully this means we will have a wet summer and not a dry one like last year. This time last year we didn't hardly get any snow at all, let alone rain.  I know my vegetable garden would appreciate it.  I didn't do so good on watering it, and every time I did water, the water would run away from the plants on the top of the dirt because it was so dry!  I tried poking a few holes in the bottom of pop cans and setting them up next to each plant and filling them up with water, hoping the water would slowly sink in.  It worked on a few of them, but the water still ran out too fast on most of the cans.  This year I may try burying a tin can halfway next to each plant with the bottom and top cut off.  Then I will fill them with water as I did the pop cans.

Here is a picture from two years ago around this time in January.

                              A snowy and frosty morning sunrise in January.



Good-bye, January.  February, here we come!

How was your January?

Week 4: A Look Back in Time

This weeks post is a look back in time.  A look back in time at one of my old pictures.  I was hoping to post a new picture that I had taken the same week as the post, but since week four is already over that's not going to happen.  Once in a while I thought it might be nice to post an old picture that I have never posted before.  Well, it looks like this week is once in a while!

                                    Hey, it worked!  The picture uploaded!! Yay!!

So this weeks picture is of a little blue bird.  I'm not sure what kind of bird it is, it looks like a hummingbird to me.  I'm not sure if there are blue hummingbirds or not.

   Last Summer my family and I went to the zoo in Omaha, Nebraska.  We hadn't been to the zoo for several years and my four year old brother had been wanting to go for a year or so.  He would ask mom if we could go to the zoo because he wanted to see real tigers and bears.  So last year we went to the zoo.  Needless to say, he was a little excited about it!

The Berniece Grewcock Butterfly and Insect Pavilion is where I got a picture of this little guy.  I had never seen a bird this color before.  He was so blue!  He didn't like to hold still very long, but I was able to capture this picture of him.  I didn't have much time to take pictures because there were lots of people behind us and we had to keep moving.  I was able to snap a few pictures of the flowers and some of the butterflies, also.

Here is a picture of one of the butterflies.  You can click on the images to see them larger.
I will also be adding these to my Flickr if you want to view them there.
Here is my Flickr:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobbihphotos/

I hope you have enjoyed these photos!