Hi!

Have been a little swamped lately and haven't gotten to participate here much. Well, being busy and forgetting a few passwords helped as well. I finally got into my email and it was a VERY wonderful thing to find emails from Richard (richardday) and Jens (JensR) asking how I was doing!

Everyone has finally gone off to bed and I've got the chance to try to catch up. Is this going to be hard or what?? Just 3-4 months, right?

So, I'll start...

Little late for Easter, but figured I'd add those with the ones from my daughter's last few skating competitions...

I set the camera on a tripod w/12 sec timer, focused on my daughter's nose, and rushed to get in the picture:
http://tsj-photo.smugmug.com/photos/269772229_buZSa-L.jpg

http://tsj-photo.smugmug.com/photos/269773613_q4m29-L.jpg

Ice skating competitions are 1 to 2 day events in most cases and complete stress inducing exercises for the parents involved. Photo_dad refuses to come to most of them because of how stressed out I get. In some competitions, have to go from this:
http://tsj-photo.smugmug.com/photos/313582923_g8gy8-L.jpg

to this in less than 20 minutes:
http://tsj-photo.smugmug.com/photos/313566966_33ysr-L.jpg

Those two aren't from the same day, but give you the idea of what has to be done. I couldn't find one of the Cat's pictures from the same day as the second one that showed the extent of the makeup as well.

In between taking care of my daughter, I take pictures of all of the other competitors from our club. Since February, I've posted over 5000 pictures to our website and those were only the keepers! At most rinks, I have to shoot through the hockey glass and the lighting is terrible. The hired photographers get dibs on the open hockey penalty boxes. But, this year I had the 50-135 F2.8 lens and I was able to use autofocus ALL the time! It was fantastic. I also used the Tamron 18-250 on autofocus as well. It worked great as long as I used 800ISO. Previously I had been doing everything manually focused.

More of my daughter's routines...
Fireworks:
http://tsj-photo.smugmug.com/photos/313576920_paBCj-L.jpg

Space Shuttle Astronaut done to 'Countdown' by Rush:
http://tsj-photo.smugmug.com/photos/291554025_52MiV-L.jpg

Hello Dolly:
http://tsj-photo.smugmug.com/photos/274702086_DYKVN-L.jpg
http://tsj-photo.smugmug.com/photos/274703439_v8d9T-L.jpg
(this is actually a backwards spiral - she's travelling away from the camera.)

Last local competition of the season: 10 trophies - 6 1st and 4 2nd - one tired skater who'd been at the rink from 8AM and it was now almost 6PM - 11 events, 10 competitive events and one exhibition group number in one day, including the full cat number shown above. That's a duet with another skater done to music from 'Cats'. I spent the whole day as accountant - entered the judges scores into the computer and fought with the program to get all of the event scores printed out correctly. So no pictures from this competition except for the large group number and the exhibition number, the last two events of the day.
http://tsj-photo.smugmug.com/photos/313533657_nse82-L.jpg

That was the only event of the year where trophies were awarded, thank goodness. I like medals best - they're smaller and easier to arrange and store. Have no idea what she's going to do with 10 trophies!

In between all those competitions, I was being a taxi driver to practices 5 out of 7 days of the week or a costume/prop designer/fabricator. Here she is practicing doubles on the harness:
http://tsj-photo.smugmug.com/photos/313559181_GakHL-L.jpg

So, not much time (or energy) to spend elsewhere. One more competition in Denver at the end of July and then we're finished (YEAH!) until the Christmas show in December.

Now I'm off to see what you all have been up to lately! I'll check back in here so if you have a thread you want me to definitely find, point me to it please!!
--
Tracy
10:59 PM