Dads View

My son absolutely loves cartoons. Cartoon Network and Toon Disney are the home of some of his favorite shows.

So the idea of actually making his own cartoon was too good to be true.

Flip books have a long history in the making of some classic movies like Bambi and Snow White:
The origins of Animation

This is a great activity for a rainy afternoon (yeah, it was pouring outside!) or when you have a few hours with your child and not much to do.

Since I’m not an animator, the idea of drawing dozens of pictures, each slightly different from the other,was a bit too much to consider doing.

This past week my wife’s washing machine started acting up…making wierd noises everytime the spin cycle started. How is that relevant you ask? Stay with me…

Well after fixing the machine, the repair guy left the old motor behind in a small cardboard box. For the first couple days I leave the heavy box sitting on our enclosed porch just waiting for garbage day.

This weekend I’m home alone with my son and he happens to notice the box when we wander out onto the porch.

“What’s that daddy?”

“A motor.”

“Should we take it apart?”

My son is going to school now!

No, I don’t mean preschool or camp or all those other places meant to prepare them…
I mean Kindergarten! The beginning of (hopefully) 16 years of education.

And I’m suprised at how much it is affecting ME.

Maybe it was sitting in those small chairs with all the other parents for the first Parent/Teacher night…

Flashbacks of first grade…being MUCH smaller than adults…looking UP at BIG people…
the row of ABC’s across the front of the room.

The hardest issue has been trust…of the teachers, not my son.

My little five year old wants to go into business for himself!

No, seriously, he’s not a full blown capitalist …he’s just curious about how the whole supply and demand “thing” works.

The other day we were in our local TV appliance store looking at new televisions when I casually asked my son which TV he likes.
He walks directly over to this giant 70″ Plasma TV and says matter-of-factly

“LET”S GET THIS ONE DADDY!”

From 10 feet away I spot the sales tag:

“ON SALE! Only $17,995″

Yeah, that’s right… the price of new Honda Civic!

I’ve been using Photoshop for several years now and have become familiar with it’s great capabilities and its limitations. Recently, I had taken some important photographs that didn’t come out as intended. My fuzzy photographs usually go immediately to the recycle bin, since I’ve never found anything that could make usable pictures out of them. Until Now.

Focus Magic is a tool that can literally do the impossible…make an unusable blurry picture sharp!

In general there are two causes for a blurry or fuzzy picture:

• Camera or subject motion
• Focusing either in front of or behind the subject

My five year old son has been studying caterpillars and butterflies in his preschool class. His interest has been insatiable! So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I came home from work yesterday and was introduced to his new pet…a one inch long brown furry caterpillar that he had found crawling across the playground after school!

We then realized that we had another problem…what do we feed this little guy? We had no idea what kind of caterpillar this was…let alone what he preferred to eat. We gave him some spinach but by today there was no sign that he had touched any of it. My son’s little pet would starve to death if I didn’t do something.

The moon is our closest celestial neighbor and one of most interesting and easy objects to study with your child.

Each month the moon goes through obvious changes that are caused by the motion of the sun and moon but every once in a while, the earth and moon put on a spectacular show visible on earth for only a few hours. In October 2004, a complete lunar eclipse was visible in much of the world. The pictures below were taken from my backyard that night with my ordinary Sony DSC F717
5 megapixel digital camera. See below for some simple tips to take your own moon pictures:

I really can’t remember when I wasn’t a photographer.

I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s in a family of photographers. Both my mom and dad were avid shutterbugs using such classics as the twin lens Rolleiflex and 35mm Leica.

I began my lifelong hobby at about 7 or 8, using a simple little camera (called a “brownie”) shooting black and white pictures in my backyard.

Those beginnings gave me an appreciation for the simplicity and magic of capturing life’s moments to share for another generation.