Cakes and cupcakes over the years- Part One

Ready for a bit of a photo montage of fun, fabulous, and often ridiculous cakes?? Good!

Let's start with this cake featuring an archaeological dig, complete with fruit rollup tent and lego workers!

Next up, what happens when you have one person with a hankering for a delicious chocolate cake and another with a craving for marshmallow icing? This!

Now, how about some festive Halloween cupcakes? I hope fake spiders don't make you squeamish!

That's all for now. Thus concludes our look into the cakes of 2008. This is a mere glimpse into the fun of what's to come.

Life without glasses

No, I'm not getting Lasik eye surgery. However, I wanted to try to capture the world as I see it, without my glasses on. Thanks to manual focus, this is quite easily done. I put on the 50mm lens and decided to aim for the nearest thing to where I was sitting- my collection of cardstock on my desk.

Once I started this task, I realized it'd be so much easier if I had contacts. Then I could just put one contact in the eye looking through the viewfinder, and leave the other eye "blind". But I don't have contacts, so I resorted to wearing my glasses at the most ridiculous angle possible.

So, here's the world as I see it (or fairly closely, anyway), without glasses. I used an aperture of 4.5, since that seemed to give me results closest to how I actually see.

And I figured some context would be good, here's the scene in focus.

Doing this task had me thinking of eye exams and how they are, unfortunately, quite subjective. Not that this was necessarily more objective, but wouldn't it be interesting to go to the optometrist and provide them with a manually focused image of how you actually see life, instead of having to look through the owl eyes and say better, worse, or about the same. Then maybe, somehow they could figure out the numbers behind it and say, oh, your prescription should actually be this and not this. Of course, I don't really know anything about the mechanics of the eye, but it was an interesting thought nonetheless.

You know it's cold out...

When you look outside and see this:

Once I eventually ventured outside I saw that there were actually multiple sun dogs. On the left side of the sun, there was a second prism farther out.

It's kind of funny, until I actually look at a picture like this, I tend to forgot that the sun really doesn't get very high during the winter. It pretty much stays at this level throughout the day. This photo was taken at 11:43AM, so the sun had already been up for 3 hours. I'm just so accustomed to it, that I never really think about it. I've lived here my whole life, it's just the way it is: 8 hours of day in the winter and 16 hours of day in the summer. As I've started to take more photographs, I've started to think more about light. And you can't really think about light without considering the sun. That's when you start to have those blatantly obvious thoughts, like "Right, the sun is only directly overhead when I'm trying to take photos of summer flowers in the backyard" or "It's so much easier to get a good sunrise or sunset picture from the south side of the house in the winter because the sun's route is that much shorter".

I've decided I'm going to do my own Project 52 of sorts. I saw one group one Flickr that gives a weekly topic, so I may participate in that one. I may also do a second project that doesn't have any particular theme, other than to have fun and try and become better at photography. I had waffled over the idea of doing Project 365, but that's just too much work at this point.