Continuous shooting

A talented photographer friend of mine recently shared that she always has her camera set to shoot continuously. Ahh, what a brilliant concept! One would think I would have learned this by now. Especially for photo shoots involving people, this makes so much sense. Sometimes it takes me a while.

I had to pull out my trusty manual because it wasn't glaringly obvious how to make this happen.

On my Canon 40D, I push the AF•DRIVE button, which is located on the top of the camera just above the status panel. Then, I rotate the dial on the back of my camera while keeping my eye on the top status panel. On the bottom right portion of the panel, five different icons appear as I scroll with my dial.

The icon below indicates single shooting. When the shutter button is pressed in this mode, a single shot will be taken.

This one indicates high-speed continuous shooting. For my camera, a maximum of 6.5 shots per second can be taken when the shutter button is pressed and held while in this mode. There is a maximum number of photos that can be taken (called a maximum burst) at a time. This number can be found on the lower right corner of your viewfinder, directly to the right of the ISO speed.

This indicates low-speed continuous shooting. For my camera, a maximum of 3 shots per second can be taken when the shutter button is pressed and held while in this mode. Again, there is a maximum burst and you can see what that number is in the viewfinder.

This is also where the self timer settings reside. This is the standard self timer setting that has a 10-second delay.

This one indicates a 2-second self-timer delay.

I am not familiar with Nikons, but I did a tiny bit of investigating and found that setting shooting modes is done much differently. It involves a lock on the main dial, which I am not qualified to speak about. Maybe somebody with this knowledge would graciously leave a comment explaining it?!

Happy shoot-shoot-shooting! It is strangely fun to hear your camera click so quickly, isn't it?

Slow cooker pork for sandwiches

My crock pot is one of my very best friends. Most days I have way too much to accomplish and I don't have time to be slaving away in the kitchen. I am all about convenience and making meals with minimal effort. This recipe requires mere minutes of preparation on my end. The crock pot (or slow cooker, or whatever you wish to call it) does the rest! Another thing I love about this recipe is that it allows plenty of room for turning up the heat. Anything that can be made spicy scores points for this girl!

Place the following into a crock pot:

A boneless pork roast (or butt, ribs, shoulder or tenderloin) weighing approximately 3 lbs (I used two 1.5-lb roasts)

A medium chopped onion

1 14-oz. can of beef broth

1/2 cup of your favorite bbq sauce (I used Famous Dave's Devil's Spit and it added a nice zing)

Cook in slow cooker on low for 4-6 hours.

Drain the broth from the slow cooker and shred the meat using two forks. Add 1 1/2 cups bbq sauce and mix together. Heat to desired temp and serve on a bun.

I ate this particular batch every night for four nights in a row, and it did not get tiring. I loved every bite!

Click here for a printable recipe!

Gin & tonic

I haven't always liked the taste of gin. I used to be scared away by its overwhelming pine tree aroma and flavor. Not that I have eaten a pine tree, but you know what I mean. Then I had my first baby and my tastebuds changed. I suddenly enjoyed the taste of it! Weird! I haven't done much experimenting with gin & tonic recipes, but this is the best one I've come across. It definitely leans toward the limey side, which I am personally ok with.

Squeeze the juice from two limes.

Cut up the lime rinds and throw them into a pitcher. Pour four jiggers of gin over the lime rinds and mash.

Add the lime juice to the pitcher and stir.

Divide between two glasses of ice. Top with tonic water and enjoy!

Crumb

I tend to keep my lunch portions on the small and reasonable side, especially on weekdays. When I am sitting in my office, that is easy enough to do. But if I meet a friend out for lunch, it is always tempting to order and eat more than I need. For this reason, Crumb, with its light/healthy menu, is perfect! It is not a chain delicatessen (isn't that a fun word?), so unless you live in the Cities you will just have to trust me when I say it is a wonderful little place.

My mother-in-law introduced me to Crumb a few years ago and ever since, it has been a favorite lunching place of mine. The menu is fairly simple, but each menu item is delicious! I can say this with certainty because I have tried almost everything on the menu.

Some of my favorite deli sandwiches include the Monterey Turkey, Veggie and Cha Cha Chicken Salad. The hot sandwiches are tasty, too, particularly the Baja and Empire. The Southwest Chicken wrap is delicious. However, my absolute favorite part of the menu involves the salads. They are yummy! All of them. Every single one. House, Greek, Caesar, Garden, Cobb and Southwest. All yummy.

After doing much taste testing within the Crumb walls, I have come to love one particular lunch more than the rest. 95% of the time, I order the Daily Double (1/2 sandwich & cup of soup, 1/2 salad & cup of soup or 1/2 sandwich and 1/2 salad) with the House salad and Tomato Basil soup. The House salad contains mixed greens, diced pears, gorgonzola, dried cherries, candied pecans and balsamic vinaigrette. It is delicious! Mouth watering! And the Tomato Basil soup is perhaps the best I have ever had. Again, delicious! Mouth watering!

They also serve fresh, juicy pears (or apples, but I always go pear), which scores huge points with me. I'm not typically a chip girl, so I appreciate the healthy, juicy, alternative.

I will admit that I have never tried any of the other soups because there is no way I will go there and not order the Tomato Basil.

Oh, and I do have one gripe about the place. The window partition thingy that is meant to shield the food from patrons' germs as they order? It is tooooo high! I realize I'm not a tall person, but even on my tippiest tip-toes, I cannot quite get my words over the glass wall appropriately. "I'D LIKE THE DAILY DOUBLE, PLEASE, WITH A HOUSE SALAD AND TOMATO BASIL!" "You'd like the Garden salad with extra chicken?"

It is totally worth the frustration, though.

Wacom tablet illustration

Ahh, I love this. This scene is from Bif's and my Boston trip that we took in 2005. HOLY COW, that seems like a long time ago. It is sometimes strange to think back to the pre-kid days. What did we do with our time back then? Anyhow, we hadn't even been dating a year when we took this trip. It was one of my most favorite vacations of all time. It was carefree, relaxing and a ton of fun.

Whenever we take a vacation, we always try to get "smooching pictures." This very photo may have been what started the smooching picture trend, now that I think of it. We placed my little Canon Powershot on the ground, set the timer and hopped up onto the ledge to smooch, with the ocean and setting sun as our backdrop.

And this is what my little camera captured.

I remember coming home from that vacation and having a serious case of PVD (post-vacation depression). I would gaze at this photo often, wishing myself back to that night.

I decided to try something fun while I gazed, so I dusted off my Wacom tablet and started to play! For those of you who are unfamiliar, a Wacom tablet is a graphics tablets that is "drawn" on with a stylus (digital pen) in order to edit photos and create digital graphics on your computer. My tablet happens to be a hundred years old, but there are some pretty swanky new tablets available these days. Some allow you to draw directly on the display surface. Oooooo, aaahhhh! Wacom tablets are super fun for nerdy graphics people like myself. Even the ancient varieties are fun.

I placed our Boston smooching photo in Illustrator and I started "drawing" over it with my stylus on the tablet. First I drew around the dark areas of the photograph, then the medium tones and then I drew in all of the highlights. The last thing I did was create the gradient for the sky and set it in the background.

There wasn't really any rhyme or reason to the way I created this illustration. I didn't work with layers (which would have been smart, in hindsight) and I wasn't very organized. If I do another illustration like this one, I will do many things differently.

My inspiration for this illustration came from the movie Waking Life. I was (and still am) enamored with the way that movie was animated. I wanted my illustration to look like a single frame from the film.

Here's a challenge for you. What are the FIVE main things I changed in the illustration? You might have to look at the bigger photos to catch everything.