JV at Winterfest

Congrats to the Trojets JV dance team, for winning both High Kick and Jazz/Funk at the Winterfest competition at Moundsview High School today. That's the first time Wayzata has been able to defeat Maple Grove this year! (MG beat us at both the Brainerd and Eastview invitationals).

So that's it for JV. Varsity has the upcoming Sections before they go to State. I'll take pictures at Sections, then I'll need to put together a slideshow of the season's photos...

But right now I gotta pick a few of my better photos of Camster and put together her Trojets poster that was due today.

Invitational and Showcase

Spent hours and hours today managing the hundreds of photographs (over 2000!) that I've taken over the past couple of months:

Saturday was the Wayzata Invitational — the final regular-season competition for the Trojets varsity squad. Took 300 photos at that event (JV and varsity, as well as awards). Uploaded 1027 photos to FFRowe.photoreflect. Also added a few of these photos to My Portfolio.

• complaint 1: the lighting is a huge challenge in the Wayzata gym — continuous brightness shifts and color shifts; it's so much easier at Moundsview, Eastview, and Armstrong, where the lighting is steady! (see my "HS gymnasium lighting" post.)


• complaint 2: arrrgh, I hate the two-sided competitions. They move along faster, but they sure have distracting, cluttered backgrounds.

Sunday was the Summit Dance Shoppe Showcase. Created a slideshow of 50 photos. Took over 750 photos, and uploaded almost 450 of them to FrankRowe.photoreflect. I'm out of practice; had a lot of trouble focusing the camera. Generally need to make a conscious effort to focus on the nearest dancer. (I almost always focus manually; my camera's autofocus is way slow).

perl, excel, XML

Been doing some interesting stuff at work lately. I'm dusting off my perl skills to add some features to an existing in-house utility. The software needs to generate line graphs; considered using perl's GD::Graph module, but settled instead on developing code to interface with Microsoft Excel. Running Excel from perl is poorly documented, but I've been able to find most of what I need thru google searches. (I had previously developed some C# software to interface with Excel...)

I'm also having to learn XML, XSL, and XSD. I've had a reasonable amount of experience with HTML, javascript, and CSS (stylesheets). But XML/XSL/XSD is all new to me. Good stuff to add to my resume I suppose...

Wayzata at Wayzata

Home meet, dance team High Kick competition. The season's coming to a close soon; district championship meet is next week at Armstrong. Then there's an invitational (two for JV), plus sections and then state for varsity.

Got much better pictures than last year in this same gym. I stuck with 1/250 sec instead of 1/350, and I believe I did a better job setting the manual white balance. 1/350 sec seems to exacerbate the brightness shifts and color shifts especially in this gym.

Camster's been sick for the past few days but felt well enough to compete tonight... she did well. I didn't get a chance to eat supper before going to the meet, so I'm starving! Off to the kitchen to whip up some pasta and sausages...

Sidda Shivers

Went to the dog park yesterday with my daughter, to take pictures of her dog Sidda. I thought I would need to keep my right index finger exposed, to be able to operate the shutter effectively. But it was way too cold, even though I was trying to pull my coat sleeve down as far as possible over my fingers. I put my glove back on and found that I had no trouble with the shutter after all. But geez it was cold; still had to stop a couple times to remove my gloves and put both hands under my jackets to thaw back out. Yes I said jackets.

Exposure (no pun intended) is always tricky in the snow. Took full advantage of the LCD screen to adjust the shutter speed/aperture properly, and then left it in manual. This burned me later when we moved under some trees and I forgot to increase the exposure... [120mm (180mm equiv), 1/500sec, f/11, ISO 800.]

Right now I'm sitting at home watching the Outback Bowl, wondering which Tennessee team will show up for this game. This team has been so unpredictable! Got my UT sweatshirt out of the closet for this occasion. Can't say that I'm proudly wearing it, since I'm hidden away in my basement. But Go Vols...