Andy Gapin

It took me a long time, but I finally got these photos done and ready to post.

Again, we stayed at Banyan Tree Mayakoba in Riveria Maya, Mexico. I can’t recommend it enough.

Welp, we got a second cat. I don’t know what we’re thinking, but we did.

We’ve actually been kind of looking for a little while because even though Leela is going to make this very difficult and feel very threatened at first, we think it’d be good for her to have a companion while we’re out and at work. Additionally, we kind of wanted a cat that would want to cuddle more since Leela mostly only does it at night while we’re sleeping.

So when a couple friends found a little kitten under their deck and were looking to find him a home, we kind of took it as a sign. The kitten is only four or five weeks old and very tiny. He’s about the same size that Leela was when I got her, but whereas she was all ears, eyes, and paws (a clear sign of the size that she was going to grow into), this little guy has beady little eyes, little paws, and a short tail. He seems like he may have been the runt and have been kicked out of the litter or something. It’s hard to know.

So far, he’s been cuddly and fun. He’s timid at first, but when he comes out, he loves people. Right now, he’s locked in the second bedroom with everything he needs. It’s going to be a few days of this before we let him and Leela meet, but I don’t know how well that’s going to go. Leela has been pretty upset since we got this guy home and has been very defensive/aggressive towards me because of it. Leela is a very temperamental and territorial cat. She’s got an ego and she’s easily threatened. You have to do everything on her terms. I really hope she gets over it and they can get along though.

Leela has a serious claim on the master bedroom so keeping the new guy in the second bedroom for now should help him claim that room as his space which should help. And considering that it seems as though he’s not going to be nearly as big as she is when he’s fully grown, Leela should have no problem asserting her dominance over him. I think once that’s established and she knows that everyone else knows she’s in charge, they’ll be okay.

So what did we name this little guy? Well, Leela is Leela, as in Turanga Leela, and all of my computers and gadgets are named after Futurama robots. We went with the obvious and named him Philip J Fry. And if the dynamic between him and Leela works out the way that I think it will, their names will be very fitting.

And here are a few photos of the little guy.

Alright, so it took me almost a month and a half to fully finish up my photos from Disney this year, but there were about 2500 to go through! Everything is now edited, tagged, rated, and…whatever else I do to my photos. I won’t go into making excuses for taking so long to finish up, but to be fair, I did post photos on Facebook a couple weeks ago before I even started tagging them.

I’m going to be posting a somewhat smaller set of photos here and I will be doing it over the span of five posts, one for each park and one for miscellaneous stuff.

To start, here are the photos from Animal Kingdom. Many of these were taking with my new Canon 70-200 f/4 L USM. These are really the only shots I’ve taken with it so far, actually.

I took a ton of pictures this weekend. I took advantage of all the nice weather and went for a little photo walk yesterday around my town and then took plenty of pictures of both my family and my fiancée’s family while we visited each of them. I’m not really that into flowers (or Easter actually, but that’s not important), but during my walk yesterday, that seemed to be the majority of what I took photos of. After that, I took a lot of shots of our families’ dogs, none of my cat though, I promise.

Great, I’m officially allergic to cats. Well, I’ve been allergic for some time, I guess, but I finally had a doctor test me. In doctor speak, my allergy is “off the charts.” That sounds pretty technical to me. Apparently, I’m also slightly allergic to dogs, but I refuse to believe that. I grew up with a dog and was always fine.

The odd thing is, I don’t think I was always allergic to cats. They never seemed to bother me before. My aunt always had cats and a ton of my friends have cats. Never had a problem. But two years ago, I got a kitten and my allergies started going nuts. It wasn’t really at first–from what I’ve read, it takes a cat until about their first birthday before they start to produce dander–but it happened. I don’t even think I can pinpoint when it started. I have bad seasonal allergies that I’ve had all my life; I’ve learned to live with them and take over-the-counter medication to help with the symptoms, but at the end of last allergy season, nothing stopped. It stuck around and actually got worse. The symptoms were similar, but slightly different too, so I knew something was up. And unfortunately for me, the over-the-counter stuff hasn’t been able to cut it.

I suspected it was either the cat (Leela, the same one you’ve seen too many pictures of) or my fiancée who moved in right around Leela’s first birthday. Though, both of those events happened at the beginning of the allergy season last year so was hard to separate what the cause was. Since I can’t just get rid of one of them for a couple months at a time, I had to get tested.

Anyway, the test came back and I’m super allergic to cats. Whether this is a newer allergy I developed or it was something I always had that was mostly masked by my seasonal allergies, I’ll never know, but this sucks. I’ve already decided that there is no way I could get rid of Leela (dammit), I’m way too attached to her (dammit, again). And my attachment to her is kind of ridiculous too, she’s a brutal human-hating bitch, but I love her. I’m like the abused woman that says she still loves the man who beats her daily.

I’m not sure how I’m going to really work all this out though. Trying to be militant about cleaning, vacuuming, sweeping, and such to try to pick up the dander isn’t really going to work too well. It’s just too hard to keep up with, I’ll do what I can, but she is everywhere, all the time. What’s worse is she has to sleep in our bedroom with us. Sometimes on the bed. Sometimes even cuddled up under my arm. This is a habit that I didn’t start with her, but after months of trying, couldn’t break either. She cries and scratches constantly at the bedroom door keeping me up all night. And nothing can get her to stop. Even going so far as to grab her, throw her in the kitchen sink, and spray her in the face with the hose from the sink does nothing to deter her. She knows it’s coming, she knows what the consequences are, but she perseveres through it because she wants in the bedroom no matter what it takes. When we finally gave in a few months ago and started leaving the bedroom door open at night, she became an entirely different cat. She was much more loving and well-behaved. However, this only my made my allergies even worse. I’ve always let her hang out in the bedroom when I’m home and awake, she likes sitting in the closet window and sleeping at the foot of the bed, but this is just too much for my body to handle.

I’ve decided that I’m going to go to an allergist and try to get the shots and see what happens. I’ll ask about my pollen allergies as well and see if those shots can be done at the same time. If they can, I’ll probably try to kill two birds, but we’ll see. Either way, it sucks because it’ll be months and months of getting shots that may not even help anything in the long run.

Oh yeah, and I don’t even like cats. Like at all. I think they’re cute, but that’s about where it ends. How did I let this happen?

I’ve only had my digital SLR, a Canon T1i, for about two months, but I decided that it would be worth it to pick up a second lens. Most of my picture taking so far has been at home and the lighting here is awful. I just can’t get enough light for anything without pumping the ISO up to 800 or 1600 or using impossibly slow shutter speeds. My cat has been my most frequent subject so a faster shutter speed is necessary. I’ve also been photographing a lot of food while fiance cooks dinner and whipping out a tripod for that is too much of a pain in the ass and just results in the food getting cold while I set everything up. So I decided a faster lens would be worth it for me even though I’m only a couple months into this brand new hobby of mine.

I went with the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II, it’s a very cheap lens–I got it for under $100 with free shipping. I was skeptical of getting such a cheap lens after all that I’ve been reading about photography and equipment (let’s just say it’s been a lot), but all the reviews for it seemed very consistent. It’s cheap looking and feeling and the focusing is loud and slow. These reviews were spot on. This thing is entirely plastic, except for the glass, of course, and feels super cheap. Focusing seems to take ages even just compared to the kit lens I have (Canon EF-S 18-55 f/3.5-5.6 IS) and it’s very loud. When I got home and saw the package on the step, I ran inside, opened it up, and popped it on right away. I opened the aperture up all the way and when I went to snap my first shot, I nearly jumped when I heard it focus.

But at the other end of the spectrum, all of the reviews also mentioned that for the money, it takes great pictures. And despite all of the complaints, it was mentioned in a few articles I read about photographing bands–something I’d like to do occasionally–so I figured it’d be worth a try. So far, I have to agree, the shots come out pretty nice. In addition to the ability to use faster shutter speeds and a lower ISO thanks to the wider aperture, I was also excited about being able to play more with shorter depths of fields. I’ve read a lot about being careful with small depths of field because you can end up with part of a face in focus and part of it out of focus. I couldn’t even imagine this until I got this lens, it just wasn’t possible with f/3.5. But I quickly found out that f/1.8 is wide enough to do this. I snapped a couple pictures of my cat while she was laying on my bed and her nose was perfectly focused, yet her eyes were blurry. It was kind of neat, but obviously not what I was going for. So while I’m having fun playing around with this, it’s definitely just an additional thing to be careful of. Though, with the DOF just right, everything looks so much better and your eyes instantly go right to the subject with no distractions.

One additional thing to note about this lens though, is that 50mm is a bit longer than I would have liked for a prime. I didn’t think it would be too bad, but I’m finding that I have to take 2-5 steps back instead of getting really up close and personal with the subject. For some shots, like with the cat, this is actually kind of nice because I don’t grab her attention away from what she’s doing as much. For other things, like dinner, it’s difficult to get everything in the frame. I don’t think 50mm would be too bad on a full-frame SLR, but on a sub-frame with a crop factor of 1.6, the lens behaves more like it’s 80mm (see, I’ve been reading up a lot!). Oh well, I’ll probably appreciate this more when I’m photographing bands.

Here are a bunch of shots I’ve taken with the lens so far. Again, there’s a lot of my cat, I swear I’m not a crazy cat lady, or even a lady at all, but I didn’t like many of the ones I took of anything not cat.

Okay, so here are a few more cat pictures. I just couldn’t help it. She was laying there looking so cute and the lighting was the best I’ve ever seen in my apartment so I had to go for it. Be afraid for when my new (faster) lens gets here and I can get more shots in here.

We had another snow day here in New Jersey, so in between doing some work from home and digging out our cars, I did a little photoshoot with Leela while she was laying on the bed.

First of all, I don’t get why everyone is hating on 2009 so much. I feel like people do this every year. One year ends and everyone hates on it saying it was terrible. But it’s the same routine every year. Maybe you have your reasons, but I bet some good shit happened to you too. Sure, a lot of celebrities died in 2009. A lot. But, you know what? You don’t know those people! Yes, it’s terrible for them and their families and friends and some of them probably brought some joy into your life through their work, but still, you don’t know them personally so don’t let that make you feel like it was a bad year. You know, if that’s your reason–hey! I’ve heard it! But that’s besides the point. Maybe that’s not your reason for hating 2009, maybe you’ve got some good personal reason and that’s fine. Maybe the recession hit you or your family hard. Fair enough. I’ll give you that, but I know one guy who would say that being laid off right in the beginning of the year was the best thing that’s ever happened to him. Anyway, the fact seems to be that people tend to hate on every year. A year ago, I was sick of everyone calling 2008 “tw0-thousand hate.” Now, I’m sick of everyone saying that 2010 better be better than 2009. People like to focus on the negative things.

I’m sure that if you think about it, there were plenty of good things that happened to you or that you did in 2009. I took up snowboarding, went sky diving for the first time, went to Paris and London, went to Chicago again, started dating the girl of my dreams, got more serious about running, spent and awesome weekend in New Hampshire with some great friends, saw a ton of great movies. The list goes on and on, but I’ll stop. There were some bad things that happened too–my dog dying being at the top of the list–and ultimately, the thing I wanted to do most in 2009 didn’t happen, but fuck it, why worry about that stuff if you don’t have to? And it’s funny, while I was going and grabbing those links back there–I had to sort through almost 200 posts from 2009–I realized that there was even more great stuff in 2009 that I had forgotten about. Hell, I went on a first date on Valentine’s Day only to never go on another date with the girl again. I totally had forgotten about that and that’s great story potential right there!

But anyway, this post is about 2010, right? Right. I think this is going to be a great year too. I hope so, at least. I’ve got some little goals. I’m going to be running my first half marathon, I’m going to Disney, I’m hoping to make good on my plan to one day move to Chicago, and I’m taking up photography. For Christmas, I got a beautiful Canon EOS t1i digital SLR. I don’t really know how to use it very well yet. I mean, I know what most of the buttons do and all that, but just getting my pictures to look decent is going to take a while. I’m really excited about it though. I’ve wanted to get a nice camera for years and years, but I was always afraid that I’d never use it because I wouldn’t want to carry the thing around all the time. Well, I got a over that. I take thousands and thousands of pictures on my little point-and-shoot, a Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS, and it’s great, but it definitely feels lacking. It will still get a ton of use, but there are plenty of times where I know ahead of time that I’m going to want to take some really nice photos. And those will be the times that I have my SLR with me. What I’m getting at here with the photography thing is that if all goes the way that I hope it does, I’ll have a lot of great pictures to post here. And post I will! I’m going to try to post more of other stuff as well this year, but we’ll see.

But for now, here are pretty much the best shots I’ve take so far with my camera. They’re all of my cat, but she makes for a great subject and the past couple of days have been way too cold and windy to go outside. Obviously, you can click them for larger versions.

Alright, so let’s go 2010! Woooo!

We tried to have our cat wear a fake bloody finger around her neck for our Halloween party, but it didn’t really pan out so well.