Its a Sad Thing That Empathy Is a Dying Trait

Having just survived both Black Friday and Cyber Monday ,two days in which I staunchly refuse to purchase anything beyond basic living supplies, because I find the concept of both days abhorrent, I have  few things to say about people’s beliefs in what the are entitled to in this life.

to the Woman who called from BestBuy all bent out of shape because she was “humiliated” because the poor kid in BestBuy (no doubt hired to work the christmas season as a sales associate on the floor with virtually no training, as that is the big box way ) Because he couldn’t find her proper information in his computer system to give her the iPhone 7 she obviously desperately needed right that second.

you, madam, are ignorant.

you stated to me that you are a lawyer. I would hope that as a lawyer you would understand that there are certain rules that we follow to make sure that not just anyone can walk in to BestBuy, be handed a $1000.00 toy, ( I love my phone, but yes they are very expensive toys , think of them as grown up, electronic woobies) and walk out, forcing someone else to pay for said toy. I’m sure that if the opposite had happened and someone had been given a phone and it was charged to your account that you would be very unhappy.

to then turn around and be rude to both that poor BestBuy employee and myself because you are “humiliated”  shows that , not only do you have a grandiose sense of self, but also have little understanding of what actual humiliation is. if I was in need of a lawyer, you madam, would not be my choice.

There are people in this country that have no homes, nowhere to sleep at night, so while you are relaxing on your no doubt comfy couch after what i am sure is a very hard day of lawyering ( with a break in the middle to go shopping at BestBuy) and playing on your electronic woobie , others are trying to find someplace dry to sleep, if they are lucky they will get to sleep in a shelter for the night where that will share their space with god knows how any other people in the same position as them. people who may or may not have drug dependencies, or mental health issues.

There are parents in this world who go to sleep knowing that even though they work hard their children are still hungry, because they cannot make enough money to support their children fully. they cannot afford to buy them christmas presents. and have to try to explain to their children why santa gives their friends, electronic woobies, and hatchimals and whatever else they have told us is the thing that we MUST have this christmas , or life is over. and these poor children ,if they are lucky, will get something that was donated to the christmas bureau .

there are people lining up to get food from the food bank, living on a diet of canned food and dry pasta. no fresh fruit and vegetables. just living on the stuff that other people decide they aren’t really doing to eat so why not donate it ?

There are people in this country who do not have access to clean water. in this country that has more clean water than pretty much anywhere else in this world.we have so much we sell it to other countries.

I have been that person who works hard but just doesn’t make enough to supply my kids with a christmas. I have gotten the Christmas hamper from the Christmas bureau. you want to know whats humiliating?  Feeding your child a canned ham for christmas dinner when they were used to turkey and all the trimmings. A canned ham greatly resembles a buttered lung when you put it on a platter at christmas time. and i was working at the time , but a minimum wage job will barely cover essentials, forget about christmas treats.

Humiliating is telling people that you have other plans , instead of going to the Work christmas party, because the money you would spend on that can be better spent elsewhere.

humiliation is not always a Scarlet letter, humiliation is something that gets inside you , makes you feel small and worthless. people may not know you feel humiliated, and the may not be intentionally humiliating you, in fact it might just be the opposite. they like you and are trying to include you, but because of your circumstances you can’t join in.

I know that I have nothing in my life to be ashamed of , I have worked hard, and done my best . I have raised my children to look at everyone they meet and see the person that is inside of them , and to know that each person has value.

I know the difference between being humiliated and being inconvenienced.  You ,madam lawyer, obviously do not. you were inconvenienced, that is all. to turn around and belittle the people whom you believed were “humiliating” you shows a lack of empathy that I find highly disturbing.  anyone who has been truly humiliated would not want anyone else to feel that way.

a month before christmas, standing in a store with muzak christmas carols proclaiming peace and love to all men playing on the PA system , you lost your shit because you were inconvenienced?

Shame on you.

Why all the fuss about the Refugees?

I need someone to explain to me why there is so much fuss over the refugees coming to Canada. It makes no sense to me at all. because lets face it, a very large portion of the people in Canada either came here to make a better life for themselves, or are descendants of people who made that decision. With my heritage, ( mostly Scots and Irish)  I’m guessing that we wound up here to escape grinding poverty and the Potato Famine, just a guess, but who can say for sure? but that’s a pretty good guess.

And don’t give me all that “we should take care of our own” bullshit. Because if we had really been worried about that then we wouldn’t have homeless people , we wouldn’t have food banks, we wouldn’t have toy drives at christmas time.  I have heard people say ” I’d like to go to the shelter and hand out Christmas dinner” … So go ahead and do it.. don’t wait until Christmas, people are hungry every day of the year.  There are always people who have less than you, and you give up your humanity if you walk by those people without a second thought.

The people fleeing Syria are people who feel there is absolutely no way they can survive in their country any more, and they are willing to risk their lives and the lives of their children to try to live.

What would you do in the same situation?

 

An open letter to the intoxicated man and the woman with him in the ER last night…

Dear intoxicated man in the ER,

You didn’t see me in the ER last night, but I saw you. You were very intoxicated, I could tell that from the minute you walked through the sliding doors. The woman who was with you was very pregnant, and looking sad and worried. I could relate to her because I remember those feelings from when my father was still alive and wreaking havoc in all our lives because of his alcoholism.

I was in the ER at the same time as you because someone making bad decisions decided that driving his car after apparently consuming alcohol was a good idea, he decided that, and the consequence of his decision impacted my family. My daughter and grandson, and her best friend and her fiancé were in an car accident last night. An accident caused by someone’s bad decision. Luckily no one was excessively hurt in this accident, but there will definitely be medical repercussions.

RMH Emergency

So while we wait in the ER to find out the extent of the damage you walk in to the ER with the worried looking woman at your side. My girls point you out to me as the person who had been harrassing them outside with some completely inappropriate comments to them, comments that I hope you remember you said to them when you are sober and that you are horrified by. I hope you sober up and realize that there is never a good time to talk to women the way you did, but to say the things you did to girls young enough to be your daughters, is disgusting, and wrong, drunk or sober.

I watch you stumble to a chair in this very overcrowded ER waiting room and proceed to basically pass out. The worried looking woman takes some time at the triage desk, and finds somewhere to sit. You don’t see us, we are in the corner, one girl in a wheelchair, the good looking young man with his face all swollen from the impact of the airbag, his broken hand wrapped in ice. The broken hand that he used to get the crying toddler out of the damaged car right after impact. He was so worried about the little one that he never even noticed his hand until everyone in the car was safely out and on the sidewalk. Accidents are like that, you don’t notice you’re hurt right away, it takes a little time for the shock of impact to wear off.

You don’t see my husband and myself, waiting with our little group of wounded people. My husband, with the manly need to be doing something positive, gets pizza to feed us and the kids, because it’s late, and they are hungry, and have been there a long time,and are going to be there longer. Myself, wanting to just hold on to my babies, because it doesn’t matter how old they are or whom actually gave birth to them, at this moment in time they all feel like my babies, because I am equally worried and relieved, yes they are hurt, but they could have been hurt far worse.

You’re still passed out in the chair, and don’t hear my daughter distress about the car, the only means she has to get anywhere with her son from our little house in the country. You can’t her cry as she worries about how she’s going to get to her jobs, the ones she has to support her son. You don’t hear her fiancé wonder about his job, which he can’t do with a fractured hand. His job that he likes, and enjoys going to every day.

You are still passed out and don’t see the relief in my face that the call I got was “Mom, we’ve been in an accident.” and not “Ms. McLeod, this is Constable Soandso, your family has been in an accident.” Which would have been infinitely worse.

And later on, when I’m following my daughters best friend outside, so that after 5 hours or so of canned air in the ER she can breathe some fresh air, watching her as she navigates on her new crutches thanks to this accident. You don’t see us, but we see you. And we can’t help but hear you, as the worried lady begs you to stay and see a doctor, and you just drunkenly state that you don’t want to be at this hospital, you just want to go home, and sleep, and that you aren’t going to drink anymore. I want to talk to the worried lady, the one with the very pregnant belly, and ask her about her relationship with you. And see if there’s anything I can do to comfort her, or help her. But my hands are full with helping my own people, and she now has someone else there to help her deal with you, so I leave it alone.

I hope that this morning, you do wake up, hungover, and remember what you said about not drinking. I hope that you remember how horribly inappropriate you were to 2 very upset young girls. I hope you remember seeing my family in the corner, dealing with the fallout of someone else’s bad decisions.

And I hope it’s enough to influence your decisions today.

Yours,

A thankful mum

Feeling HOT,HOT,HOT!!

I like the summer weather, but the last couple of weeks have been brutally hot here in our neck of the woods. I DON’T like turning on my oven in the summer so I am a big fan of small appliance cooking.  The appliance I get the most use out of in the summer is my slow cooker.

Let’s face it , the slow cooker is the perfect way to cook at any time of the year if you are essentially lazy,  like myself. A large portion of the recipes tell you to put all of the ingredients into the cooker, ( some times in a specific order, sometimes just dump it in and stir).  I use mine for breakfast, ( Slow Cooker Oatmeal) , for dinner ( Slow Cooker Butter Chicken)  potlucks ( Slow Cooker Meatballs) and even desert! (Slow Cooker Brownies)

Looks delicious!

This recipe is here

are Slow Cookers, cheaper than a conventional stove?

Cooking with a crock is also very inexpensive when compared to the costs of running an oven. Using my Kill A Watt power meter, I’ve found that a crock pot consumes around 250 watts of power while an oven can draw up to 4000 watts – depending on how you’re cooking. This means that using a conventional electric oven for one hour can cost around 20 cents while operating a crock pot for 7 hours costs only 10 cents – an energy savings of 50%.  – Kerry K. Taylor of Squawkfox.com

Isn’t this pretty?

check out the deets on this bad boy here!!

A lot of Slow Cookers today have great features , like temperature probes for meat , and timers so they go from a cooking cycle to a keep warm cycle after a certain number of hours.  And if your an organized, type-A personality ( and you know who you are!) you can spend a day making up packages that you just pull out of the freezer the night before and then dump into the Slow Cooker in the morning, and let it cook all day while you’re at work. Once your home all you need to do in most cases is just dish up your dinner. Easy Peasy, Lemon Squeezy, as the grandson likes to say .

AS long as your Slow Cooker has the removable pot the clean up should be a snap, and if you really hate dishes, you can use Slow Cooker liners, or sometimes parchment paper to make clean up a breeze.

All in all Slow Cookers are my kind of appliance, no fuss, no bother, just get the job done, but not in a hurry… lol

Pax

Melissa Ann

Oh Christy, “Yoga-gate” might be the beginning of your downfall…

For those who believe “you can’t fight city hall”—or any government—think again. When stupid decisions touch a common nerve that causes public anger to go viral, they can be fought and often reversed with sufficient focus, velocity, and coordinated action. The trick is to find that common nerve that provokes its own reflexive action.

– Martyn Brown

Martyn Brown was Premier Gordon Campbell’s chief of staff, so I’m guessing he knows a little bit about Canadian politics. ( as an aside, I always get a giggle when a politician is named Campbell… The translation from Gaelic to English is “crooked mouth”)

Martyn’s article about Christy and her “Om the Bridge” debacle can be read here

Mr. Brown’s quote really struck a chord in me, because I believe that we can fight city hall. All it takes is for one reasonable person to say ” no” and for others to hear it and agree.  That what happened with Rosa Parks, and it set of the civil rights movement.  There is no reason to believe that you can’t win against ” City Hall”. Our government is to be held accountable. To us, the people of this province and this country, the problem is the government, if given the chance, will say to us ” oh, well, This doesn’t concern you” and we as Canadian citizens respond with ” Oops, sorry to have stuck my nose in and voiced my concerns” instead of saying, ” Wanna bet?  Of course this concerns me, this is my province and my country and I think what you are doing is not right”

We shouldn’t need Jane Fonda to come to our protests to highlight the fact that we are against something, there are more than enough of us saying ” we don’t like that” . For our elected officials to ignore that is not good.  What is worse is for the people of the province to act like a sulky teenager and say ” well I’m not gonna say anything because no one listens anyway”  that is the biggest failing we have, and we need to correct it.

so I will continue to speak up, even if no one has asked for my opinion, because if enough of us do, things can change…. And change is good.

Premier Christy Clark, where do you get off?

My children are good people, they are both adults now, and I say this with complete confidence, my children are good, hardworking, young people.

it’s a damned shame that they are being punished for it.

not my son so much, he has a job where he gets a steady 40 hours a week, and he makes more than our pathetic minimum wage.

my daughter , on the other hand, is being screwed by the provincial government.

You see my daughter, who is 20 years old, has a 4-year-old son. She was working and going to high school before she got pregnant, worked up until her ninth month of pregnancy, when she had to stop working, she applied for her maternity benefits just like any other working mother in this province, all she took in the way of money from the province was her maternity benefits, And a daycare subsidy so that she could finish school and graduate on time. ( She also recieves the federal CTB, which every low-income parent is entitled to in this country), she didn’t collect any welfare, and went back to work when her son was still a wee thing, and she has worked pretty much non stop since.

Right now she is working 2 part-time jobs. 2 part-time jobs at our crappy minimum wage, which isn’t even close to being enough to survive on, but she lives with me, and sleeps on the couch so her boy can have a room. She doesn’t collect any welfare still, even though she hates being on my couch, she just works her ass off, taking shifts whenever she can, getting her CTB from the federal government, and a daycare subsidy.

Except she isn’t getting that subsidy.

You see she was laid off from one job in December, and didn’t start a new 2nd job until March, The one job she did work was at night, so gramma and I picked up the slack and watched the boy while she was working. In March she started another daytime job, while still keeping the nighttime job, so she asked my grandson’s daycare if he could come back.

the daycare said, “no problem, his space is still here.”

So now we have the same kid, with the same name, and the same parent, going back to the same daycare right? Getting her subsidy reinstated or started again should be pretty simple.

uh… No.

when he went back to the daycare in March, my daughter, filled out all the forms just like she has before, and faxed, ( yes faxed, God forbid the provincial government should have an online PDFs version,and an email it can be sent to, although I hear that is now the way that WW II veterans are supposed to contact the Department of Veterans Affairs, and apparently they have an app for iPhone as well) the forms in just like she aways has. Nothing has really changed except for the name and location of the employer.

That was in March.

The end of March came around, and My daughter paid her portion of the daycare bill, ( no the subsidy doesn’t cover her whole daycare Bill, she still pays a rather large chuck of change out of her pocket) and her and the daycare waited for the cheque for the rest of it.

No Cheque…

the daycare called the subsidy people, tried to find out what was happening, got the run around, and no solid answer…

My daughter tried calling them, was on hold for 2 hours, and finally had to hang up because she had to get ready for work,

daycare called again the next month (April) , got told an entirely different story, and that the cheque might come the next week.

no cheque…

my daughter tried to call again, but seeing as she kinda has to work her minimum wage job and her boss is most unreasonable and won’t let her spend 2 hours on hold on his time, she has a hard time getting ahold of them during regular business hours.theres no way to leave a message, no way to leave your number for a call back like they do at the cable company so you can move on with your day. Just sit there and wait. On hold. Until they can get to you.

My husband, who has the kind of job where  you can spend 2 hours on the phone and not get fired, called for her, he was on hold for 90 minutes, before he had to hang up and move on with his day.

Still no cheque…

It is now the end of March, my daughter, who works herself to the point of exhaustion, has now been told that unfortunately, my grandson cannot go back to daycare next week, because the subsidy portion has not been received. The subsidy people are telling the daycare worker that there MIGHT be other things that need to be sent in by my daughter, however they don’t seem to be smart enough to contact my daughter and tell her that.

If the shoe had been on the other foot and they wanted money from my daughter you can bet they would have made that process just as easy as possible, like the way you have to give your bank account information to sign up for the Treo sticker to get across the toll bridges, they sure make that one nice and easy…

In a world where I can take a picture of my pay cheque with my phone and have it deposited into my account, and they close down Veterans Affairs offices and give the octogenarians that served our country an iPhone app, and online registration, you would think they would use a little common sense and a little of the technology available to them.

but I guess that because it’s only low-income people who need daycare subsidies they don’t really count.

Christy Clark doesn’t get a subsidy… She most likely has a live in nanny, and even if she didn’t she could take her kid to work with her every day and no one would say a damned thing about it.

I just hope that when my daughter is older and has more power she remembers this, and how this government treated her, and other like her. They say they want to do more for low-income, single parents, fine, put your money where your mouth is and stop making it so damned hard to do the things that need to be done to survive.

because that all she can do at this point is survive. Never mind living, that’s something people with money can do.

iPad Photo Editing, or You want me to do what with my finger?

I love Cameras, and I am not an elitist when it comes to cameras, I love “real” cameras ( ie DSLR’s), point and shoot cameras,  phone cameras, film, digital, doesn’t matter. A camera is a wonderous thing in my eyes.  Now I would like you all to believe that I am the new  Annie Liebowitz or Ansel Adams and my photos fall from my camera perfect and ready for framing.

unfortunately this isn’t quite true.

sometimes pictures need a little tweaking, ( truth be told, all photos need tweaking, and even if you bring your waterproof disposable camera in for developing they actually tweak the photos because the colors are usually so off you can’t believe it .)

Computers are great for editing, and there are any number of programs you can use, I like Photoshop , Lightroom, iPhoto, Aperture, Gimp, Plus some stuff I have found for my mac on the app store. There is a reason that photography has its own category in the app store, and it has almost 1500 apps available for the mac, many of which are also available for iPhone or iPad

the ones that I use most often on my iPad are Handy Photo, Leonardo, and Adobe Photoshop Express  for iPad.  All of these are paid Apps but I think the most expensive was around 5 bucks. Leonardo is my Latest addition, and I love it. Leonardo has the ability to make Layers! Yes Layers! so you can add things and tweak things to your heart’s content. and it seems very user-friendly, with video tutorials to help you figure out what you want to do.

You can download it from iTunes here

Handy Photo has some great Features and seems to do a lot more intuitive stuff, and it also has tutorials to help you.

Handyphoto is available here

The Adobe Photoshop Express App used to be my go to app, but the other two are far more fun. it is still a great app for basic edits, ( crop, color, etc) and if you are more familiar with Photoshop than I am it will probably be super easy to use.

you can find that link here

The Bad news is that Leonardo is only Available for iOS devices, the other 2 are also available for android. But I believe the makers of Leonardo are working on a an android version.

Give them a try , you’ll  find they can really help”tweak” those photos, no matter what kind of camera they were taken on.

Pax

Missy

Adventures in Walmart’s parking lot, or, what’s wrong with you people?

I  live out in the sticks, and I’m very happy that I do, it’s lovely and quiet, I get all kinds of animal visitors, in the morning I wake up to the sound of birds  singing, and at night I fall asleep to the sound of the creek that runs through my yard. Pretty darn peaceful… 

  

 But the longer I live here the more I find trips into more populous places disturbing, because the are full of people in their cars.

I have held a drivers licence for over 30 years, I have had a few jobs that involved driving for many hours a day, I even met my darling husband at one of these jobs, ( when I was driving a cab) so I know about the written and unwritten rules of the road ( even the obscure ones, like if I’m driving and a big rig signals that he want to move into my lane, I flash my high beams to let him know I have seen and am acknowledging his need to change lanes. If he/she doesn’t hit the backup lights as A thank you, I judge them.)

So a trip ” into town” shouldn’t be all that bad right? I wish this were true…

Yesterday we went to IKEA , in Port Coquitlam. After IKEA we stopped at a Walmart to pick up a couple of things, and the stuff I saw in the parking lot was enough to make me crazy. There were a few things that made me a little irate like this  

 
But there was other stuff as well, like the 4 cars that were parked in the alternative fuel parking spots that were obviously not alternative fuel cars, and don’t get me started on the fool in the jeep that drove over the side walk because it would be about a minute faster than going the correct way,things like this are the reason my children have always said “Mom, you have road rage issues” 

 Yesterday  I had parking lot rage issues …
As my husband and I are both able bodied individuals and the grandson is now 4 and no longer needs to be carried  everywhere when we go to a Walmart on a Sunday we go in fully expecting to have to park a little ways from the door and to have a nice little walk to the entrance. It was nice and sunny so no big deal. We were in the husbands little Hyundai ( works out cheaper to take a Hyundai to IKEA , rather than my minivan, it can haul back too much stuff home from IKEA ..lol) so we have no problem qualifying for the “small car” spots, as I am walking to the door this is what I see. And I will be listing off what I find so wrong with this picture.
  
And yes, I left the webpage address on the truck visible so people can go to the site and leave a message about what a jerk this person is..

The thing about this that set me off is more visible in this picture take at the front of the vehicle.

  
None of theses are what I would classify as small cars…. The Ford F-150 however,is so large that you can’t even see the phrase “small car”  on the parking spot because it is hidden underneath! 

Now there are quite a few things about this that bug me. Firstly, is the fact that this truck is not small, and the driver is an ignorant, self important jerk who was just to lazy to go to a larger spot a little further down. 

Why would you even drive a truck this big?  Well, it’s advertising a construction company ( yes I did check them out, and no I wasn’t terribly impressed) so giving them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they occasionally have to haul something to a site. But the cynical little voice in my head says ” look ath the shiny paint, look how clean that is, they have never carried anything in this truck.” And as it was a Sunday afternoon in the middle of a long weekend here in Canada, that makes it seem even less likely that they were carrying anything to or from a site. Did I mention that there was no construction going on at that particular Walmart? And having checked out their site I’m gonna hazard a guess that they don’t purchase their supplies at Walmart either. So even less reason for this big, obnoxious, gas guzzling monstrosity to be out and about. ( just to make it clear I checked out the miles per gallon on both the 2015 F-150 and the 2015 Accent.. The F-150 gets a combined Highway/city rate of 22 MPG the Accent gets a combined 30MPG, so yes that’s a bit of a difference)

Driving a vehicle like this for some people is a necessity, I get that. But for this suburbanite ( I feel safe in saying that they probably live fairly close to the Walmart we were at, if there’s any truth to how geographic profiling works, thanks Kim Rossmo!) I would guess that there is no good reason for this work vehicle to be be out and about on this particular day.  It’s just showboating, and it’s wasteful and the exact opposite of eco friendly. 

If I had had a scrap of paper on me, believe me, I would have left a note under the windshield wiper calling this person all kinds of names and questioning their intelligence.  I didn’t have one, so guess what? I decided to blog about it instead, so now this will be available for anyone to see.  

Yes I will be emailing a link to this blog to the construction company’s contact us page, and I hope that whomever was driving this horrible monstrosity ( please insert joke about truck sizes vs. penis size here) will at least not be so ignorant as to park where they shouldn’t, or at best, maybe drive something smaller if at all possible. ( I doubt this person only has this vehicle)  The funny part is that if hadn’t of planned out my day to save gas and be a Eco responsible as I could, I wouldn’t have been in that particular Walmart, and wouldn’t have seen any of this. 
Pax 
Missy

iPhones and Depth of Field…

So  as a continuation to my last blog, today I’m going to talk about getting decent depth of field with your iPhone.

I use my iPhone a lot, and I print many of my photos, I love Instagram and even have a little album of my favorite instagram prints. 

  
This photo was taken with my iPhone, and then edited in Instagram. There was some slight blurring of the background in the original photo but most of the blurring was added during post process. Tonight I have just learned how to add a decent amount of blurring while I take the photo, and how to tweak it afterwards if I need to.

  

 

I took this photo tonight with my iPhone 5. As you can see the lid to my water bottle is nicely focused, and my sewing machine in the background has a good amount of blur.  This was achieved by locking the focus on the water bottle lid. You can select the focus in an iPhone by taping the part of the photo you want the camera to focus on. You can LOCK the focus by hold your finger on the part you want in focus until you see this on the screen

  
You should get the little AE/AF lock with a little box around the part that you have locked on. Then you can hit the trigger and get the shot.

  

 

This shot is without doing a focus lock, you can see the lid but you can see the sewing machine in the background pretty clearly as well.

Try using the focus lock to really make your iPhone photos pop. I think you’ll see a real difference in your photos.
Pax
Melissa

Giving up the blur tool, or How I came to understand Depth of Field

as a novice photographer I had a heck of a time understanding Aperture, shutter speed, ISO and all those other cool things that photographers talk about in very knowledgeable ways. I just knew what kind of pictures I wanted to take, and how I wanted them to look without having to drag them into photoshop ( or in my case, GIMP) to manipulate.

Now I feel comfortable enough with these things that I can explain them to people in ways they can understand. That’s how I know how well I understand something. There’s plenty of stuff I understand, but not in enough depth to explain it. Then there’s the stuff that I have learned well enough to explain in multiple ways, so that people can wrap their head around the concept.

  
This is a photo I took this afternoon of our dog, Mayday. Because I was using a 50mm lens with the aperture set at 1.4 you can see tha her cute little face is in focus but the blankie she is laying on is all blurry. Even her front legs are blurry compared to her face. These are things I like in a portrait, because I want the focus to be on the face, not the background. This is a very shallow Depth of Field.

“But Melissa Ann,” you say, ” what the heck does that 1.4 aperture mean?” Well, it basically means that the hole in the lens that the light is passing through is very big, and an aperture of 22 ( or f22 ) would be a teeny,tiny hole for the light to pass through. I know this makes no sense, the lowest number having the biggest hole and vice versa. What you have to remember is that the number isn’t measuring the size of the hole, but the amount of metal that’s showing, so when it’s wide open you see very little metal. Learning this helped me understand the aperture numbers much better.

  
This photo of my scooter was shot at a much higher aperture, because of this it has a much deeper depth of field, and you can see lots of detail in the bike and in the background, so this was probably shot at around 11 of 13. This a deep Depth of Field

  
using shallow DOF can really help focus the eye on the part of the photograph that you want people looking at. Not the annoying stuff that’s going on in front of behind your subject. This can come in really handy when your out and about taking touristy type photos as well.( no more shots of the big guy in burmuda shorts, socks, and sandals, lurking in the back of your photo YAY!) 

Learning how to take your camera off the auto mode and put it on Aperture mode ( Av on the camera dial) is a great way to start learning how to really het the pictures that you want, and will help you figure out how aperture, shutter speed, ISO and White Balance all warm together. 

Here is a link to a video that shows all the different aperture settings on a very nice 50mm lens.

Canon Canada has a great site where you can play with different settings and see the results, you can check it out  Here
A later post will show pictures take at different shutter speeds and what you should use depending on the shooting situation

Pax

Melissa Ann