and things went downhill from there

What better way to while away a blizzard than by hanging out in the house and taking pictures of our white cat?

Jaws is a far and away the most elusive of our cats when the camera comes out. Getting her to look at the camera is half the battle, and even when she does, her eyes are invariably shut when you snap the picture.

Belladonna was being cute earlier this evening, and I decided to try my hand at nabbing a picture of her. In shot after shot, she was either squinting, or had her eyes shut tight. Hm. She is usually not one to do that. I checked my camera's settings and noticed that I had the focus assist set, and I felt a bit silly as I was changing it back because I had forgotten that I had turned it on when taking a picture of the Christmas tree the a couple of weeks back. I tried a few more times to get a picture of Belladonna, but her patience was wearing thin, and I began to fear what she might do to me in the night if I kept pushing the issue.

I decided to tackled the Jaws challenge. She had been hunkering in the back part of the house for most of the evening, and I figured it would not take a lot of effort to coax her out with the promise of some human contact. She was very pleased to see me, and I had a cunning plan. My thinking was that if I shot at a fast enough speed (say, 1/640 of a second) I could catch her before she had a chance to squeeze her eyes shut. I took three pictures, and in each of them she somehow psychically anticipated the shutter and had her eyes shut tight. How does she know?!

She climbed onto my lap, and I decided to try shooting blind by holding the camera out at arm's length. The moment I did so, I realized that our cat was not some kind of magical, shutter-anticipating creature. At some point I had apparently turned on the focus assist on the flash. I sifted through the menus until I figured out how to disable that, cranked the flash around to give a nice, indirect light and held the camera out at arm's length again. I called her to get her attention and managed to capture this. Obviously it is not perfect, but I think it turned out pretty good given how it was shot. I did not even bother to crop it.

ISO 100, F 1.8,1/640sec, 35mm

After failing miserably last year, I am only venturing into this again because atara is also doing it, and we can each keep the other in line.

My rules are the same as the ones I laid out last year - I will try to upload a picture every day, though if I do not get a good picture on a particular day then I will feel free to post a better one taken on an earlier day - within limits because I want the pictures to be a pretty good representatin of the time of year when they were taken.

Where better to start than the start? We had hoped to have a big feed of Chinese food at Winter Garden on New Year's Eve, but they were so busy that they were not seating until late, and we had the choice of waiting for 90 minutes before they started seating, or dine elsewhere.

We went for Indian food, then came back the next day for the Chinese food. While we were waiting for our order, I snapped a shot of our teapot for no reason other than that it was there. On a whim, I applied a solarising filter and I liked the results. I don't think that it is a particularly good picture, but I decided that I may as well star the year by lowering peoples expectations with a (mostly) contentless, over-processed shot.
20130101

( More pictures behind the cut. )