Learning New Things

It has been quite the educational week for me.  It started off on Wednesday night with my beautiful mama and I taking a glass fusion earring making class at Glass Endeavors in Minneapolis a few nights ago.  What a fun skill to have to be able to take a couple pieces of glass, melt it down and have it turn into something really beautiful.  Don't get me wrong, it is not as easy as it sounds.  It was quite the process picking out all the little pieces to fuse together.  First you have to pick out the base/back of your earring.  Then, you need to decide what you want to put on top of it.  We decided to go with a dichroic look where it will come out gorgeous and glistening.  The results were pretty amazing.  We picked out the same piece of dichroic but mom picked out a black base and I went with a light purple.  It made all the difference in the world.  The pair I made is on the left and mom's is in the middle.  If they look funny it's because there is a piece of scotch tape over them to hold the backs in place until the glue dries.

The pair on the left I made with a piece of patterned glass on the bottom, a piece of clear glass in the middle and some blue "spaghetti" glass glued on top.  They turned out a little heavier than I would have liked but cute none the less.

For the last few months I have been doing some serious research on purchasing a new camera and a couple of weeks ago we bought a Nikon D5100.  It's our first DSLR camera so needless to say we have no idea what we're doing.  The learning continued on Thursday night with the hubby and I taking an Intro to DSLR class offered at National Camera Exchange.  Since we bought the camera through them, we get the 3 part class for free.  We had no idea what to expect out of this class since it was free and all.  We weren't even 10 minutes in and I knew we were going to leave even more excited to come back for the next class.  They covered all the basics about how to go from taking a picture to taking a photograph by using things like point of focus, ISO, shutter speed and aperture.  I've been snapping pics like crazy since we bought the camera and already I can tell a huge difference since taking the class.  There's no way I could take pics like these with our little point and shoot.

And one last one for you.  This is Kigen saying "Heeeeeeeyyyyy!!"