Patriotic Doodle, First Attempt and Going Manual

One of Fi and Abby's friends (in 'blogville' - they've never actually met, but they are good buddies on Facebook and they visit each other's blogs) is this painfully cute Golden Retriever named Newton.   Last year, when Newton was a wee pup, his parents got a picture of him holding an American flag in his mouth. There were rumors that there might have been some cheese wrapped around the little flag pole, but given Newton's general awesomeness we find it hard to believe that he required any 'performance enhancing' substances!  (Yes, I've just finished reading a book on Lance Armstrong  Why do you ask?)  To see what the picture of Newton looks like, check out this link: http://www.cafepress.com/mf/79344951/4th-of-july-patriotic-puppy_sticker?productId=1188611828 (Newton's parents sell the image, and I haven't contacted them to see if I could post the actual photo, and I didn't want to do so without their permission.  But trust me.  It is painfully cute.  Go check it out.)

Anyhoo, I have long desired to come up with a similar photo of either Fi or Abby, or both.  In my attempts to do so, I discovered that neither one of them understands the concept of holding something in their mouths. Other than tennis balls (with they are both reluctant to give up).  So, I finally came up with the brilliant idea of sticking one of the flag in the tennis ball.

Today was my first attempt at this, and while I had some lighting issues (mostly Fi kept moving around and I wasn't fast enough in moving the lights around, and Fi was rapidly losing interest in the project, so I had to accept that the first time around wasn't going to be perfect), I was pleased with the results.  (For some reason, blogger has lightened these photos - no idea why...)

You get the idea.  We've got some work to do before the 4th of July, but this was an encouraging first step.

In other excitement, I've been getting a little frustrated with the shutter-priority setting - even at 1/4000 sec, on sunny days, it drops the aperture to f/3.0, making it very hard to get photos that have any depth-of-field (so anything that isn't in the immediate area of focus gets very fuzzy).  So, I took another stab at the manual setting.  While I had to do a lot more adjusting of shutter speed and aperture to get what I wanted, it finally worked out.

Look up, Abby!

Day 172/365.