Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Monthly Photos

Every month, Tyla and I sat Elijah down in our little homemade photo studio and took a series of pictures. It was an interesting photo challenge for me and I learned quite a bit. I’m not saying the results are professional, but I thought it was worth sharing what I learned.

  1. Consistent Lighting – The more consistent your lighting, the easier time you’ll have combining all the photos into a collage. We accomplished this by purchasing some halogen work lights. They’re very hot so I bounce the light off the ceiling instead of frying and blinding my son.
  2. Consistent Backdrop – Tyla bought a big white sheet and a big black sheet from a thrift store. In a corner of one room, I put 3M sticky hooks on the wall. I covered the top two corners of each sheet on both sides with packing tape and then punched a hole through the corners making a cheap grommet. Those holes go over the sticky hooks and bam, you’ve got a simple backdrop that’s easy to remove if you need the space.
  3. Consistent White Balance – I purchased a color calibration card and got in the habit of snapping one photo with that in the frame each time. This makes it super simple to get the white balance consistent across all the photos even if your lighting isn’t the same every time. Unfortunately I didn’t buy it until a few months into the project and I never could get those first few months to be just right (we also didn’t have the halogen lights until later in the project so that compounded the problem.)
  4. Reference Photos – If you’re going to take the same photos every month, make sure you list them out on a sheet of paper or just print off the first set that you get. At some point you’re bound to make a mistake and use the wrong prop with the wrong backdrop. You can see that in our dog photos.
  5. Tagging – I use Lightroom to store and edit my photos. Whether you use Lightroom too or if you just put them in a folder, make sure that as you’re editing the photos each month, you tag or otherwise set aside the ones that you’ll use when you group the whole series.

Every month seemed to present it’s own challenges. For example, he’s very mobile now so getting him to stay in one place long enough to take a photo is nearly impossible. Other times it was hard to find a time when he was happy and we were free. But in the end we got a fun series of pictures that shows how much he changed over the first year of his life. Kudos to Tyla for coming up with the idea.

benmartens July 18, 2014 Photography

Throwback Thursday – April Fools 1998

For April Fools of my Senior year, we organized a prank on Pastor Schneider. At the beginning of religion class, we had the principal, Mr. Zanto, call Pastor into the office for a call from his wife (both of them were in on the joke.) Mr. Zanto agreed to watch our class while Pastor was gone.

As soon as Pastor left, we quickly moved all of the desks and even the overhead projector out the back door and set the classroom up outside. Getting the principal and his wife in on the gag turned out to be a good move because it mean that he couldn’t get too mad at us. A yearbook photographer was on hand to make sure this made it into the book.

Looking back at this photo, it’s interesting to see the people who weren’t looking back at the photo. Surely this was announced as “hey, smile for the camera” so I guess they didn’t think the joke was funny. Party poopers!

benmartens July 17, 2014 Throwback Thursday

The Rod Groon Shew

I don’t remember the first time that Dad and I found the Red Green Show, but we spent a lot of time together watching it. One episode that really cracked us up was when Harold read a letter from a reader with a broken keyboard. The O and the E were reversed. This all happened before everything was on the internet so I didn’t know what episode number it was or anything like that.

Thankfully now every episode of the Red Green Show is available (legally!) on YouTube. That still didn’t help me much though because there are hundreds of episodes to sift through. Then I found this page that lists out the subject of the “Male Call” segment of the show! Sure enough, it says that in the episode “Homemade Cheese” a reader writes a letter with a broken keyboard!

I found the episode on YouTube. Here it is for your enjoyment. The segment starts at the 19:06 mark.

benmartens July 16, 2014 Commentary

Backyard Completed!

It has been a long road and this will be a long post, but Tim and I are finally done with the back yard. I got the two gates built, installed and stained and on Saturday at noon, I declared the project done. “Done” here means that all the big pieces are completed and the yard can be locked up again. There are still plenty of smaller items like making one final dump run, adding bark chips, etc but those aren’t as urgent and I’ll just work them into my normal home improvement projects. The front yard is still a mess too, but that will sit for a couple months until Tim is available again. The front yard should be a lot smaller project too. So with all those caveats, I’m done!

When I show people photos of the finished project, it’s kind of anti-climactic. They look at the before photo and wonder why we changed anything. So let me go back and list out the reasons why we weren’t thrilled with our old back yard:

  • Any time it rained, the yard was muddy. Drainage was horrible/non-existent and water would sit in the yard for days after a heavy rain. From roughly November through May the grassy area was pretty much unusable.
  • The cedar swing was nice but it took up a big chunk of our yard. We only used it once or twice for photos because it was a giant spider web. As I started tearing it down, I also learned that it was very rotten and probably would have caused some serious injury before too much longer.
  • The fence was rotten and falling over. I had propped it up with some extra supports but those weren’t enough to hold it anymore.
  • The pine trees (arbor vitae) along the fence were getting close to the end of their life and were starting to brown. The thundercloud plum in the corner was disaster. Please don’t ever plant one of these trees.
  • Most of the bushes in the back yard were not pruned well by the previous owner and were overgrown.
  • The “retaining wall” appeared to be constructed with old concrete from the patio that was there before the new one was put in. It was about two feet high and I can’t tell you how many times it crumbled underneath me. We would have constantly been pulling Elijah back from it as he toddled around (if he could even make it there in the mud.)

So yes, on the surface it looked ok, but as we got more familiar with the yard, we knew it’s time had come. Now we have a beautiful new yard!

[UPDATE: These links are broken now, but I’ll leave the text] I made a Photosynth of the back yard in it’s current state. If you forgot what it looked like before, you can check out this previous Photosynth. Honestly I do like the way the old yard looked like it had been lived in and wasn’t brand new. This new one has so much more space though and it will grow in like the old one did (but without getting out of control!)

It should come as no surprise that I was collecting a lot of data about this project as we went. Here are some facts:

  • Major features completed: French drains, irrigation, retaining wall, and fence
  • Square feet of grass before: 475. Square feet of grass after: 1175
  • Number of retaining wall blocks: 441
  • Linear feet of fence: 152
  • Gates: 2
  • Posts: 21
  • Cedar fence panels: 332
  • Gallons of stain: 13.5
  • Nails: 2200
  • Yards of dirt added: 34
  • Home Depot Transactions: 32
  • Project calendar duration: 44 days
  • Actual days spent working: 41 days (only 3 days with no progress!)
  • Days affected by rain: 1
  • Estimated savings by doing it ourselves1: 58%
  • Total Hours spent: 310

1 This calculation was done using a standard contractor markup for materials and then assuming that professional labor would work 30% faster than we did (except for Tim.)

Here are a couple charts breaking down the cost by feature of the yard and then another one showing how much time each helper put into the yard. Thank you everyone! The cumulative hours chart shows that we kept the rapid pace up for the whole project. I don’t think we could have done it quicker without taking more vacation or hiring more help. Nearly every available hour was spent working on the yard.

And finally, here are some photos, starting with before:

During:

After:

And finally, here’s a complete list of all the timelapses I made along the way.

This is the last you’ll see of the yard updates for a couple months until we start on the front yard. Until then you’ll find me in the back yard admiring our work with meat on the grill and a beer in my hand.

Links to previous updates 1, 2 , 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7

UPDATE: The front yard is done now too!

benmartens July 15, 2014 Home Improvement, Projects, Timelapse

Jalapeno Popper Dip

For the Fourth of July, we were looking for a delicious side dish to take to Tim and Chelsea’s party. We ended up making this and wow, it was a big hit! It’s very simple and made good use of our new food processor. The original recipe suggested serving it with buttery crackers or a French baguette but we used tortilla chips.

Ingredients

  • 2 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese, room temp
  • 1 cup mayonnaise
  • 1 cup shredded Mexican blend cheese (half Jack, half cheddar cheese)
  • 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
  • 1 (4 ounce) can chopped green chilies
  • 1 (4 ounce) can sliced jalapenos – double if you like heat
  • 1 cup panko bread crumbs
  • 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
  • 1/2 stick butter, melted

Directions

  1. In a food processor, add the first 6 ingredients and process until smooth. You do not need to drain either can of peppers.
  2. Spread the dip into a greased 2-quart casserole.
  3. In a bowl, mix breadcrumbs, Parmesan cheese, and melted butter; mix well. Sprinkle crumb mixture evenly over the dip.
  4. Bake in a preheated 375 degree F. oven for about 20 minutes. You want the top to get browned and the dip to be heated through and bubble gently on the edges. Do not overcook this dish or the mayonnaise with separate and you will have a grease puddle in your dip.
benmartens July 14, 2014 Food

Yard Project Update 7

Everything is coming together! This week is all about the finishing touches. To get started, we put down two more yards of dirt on Monday.

On Tuesday, we planed 10 emerald green arborvitae trees along the fence line. We got 7 foot trees so that they were just taller than the fence now and they’ll grow ~6” per year until they’re back up at the height we had before. The old trees that were there really helped to hide the fact that the neighbor’s house is so close. There’s a drip irrigation line running around the trees so I set up the controller to keep them well-watered while they are adjusting to our yard.

Wednesday morning we had sod delivered all the way from Oregon. It’s a mixture of fescue and rye and it looks beautiful! Tim and I laid it all down on Wednesday night. The irrigation is a huge help again here because the sod really needs a lot of watering to recover from it’s journey. On top of that, it’s supposed to be 90+ degrees for the next 7 days. Hopefully everything stays green and healthy and puts down good roots. If that all goes well, we’ll be able to use the yard in just 2-3 weeks!

There is a seemingly endless list of small things that I can keep doing on the yard, but I’m calling it “done” once I finish building the second gate, install it, and then stain both gates. At that point we’ll have a closed back yard with everything planted. Dump runs, mulching, etc can be handled much more slowly as I have time. The next update you get on this project should be the grand finale! (At least for the back yard… the front yard starts in a couple months.)

Links to previous updates 1, 2 , 3, 4, 5 and 6

benmartens July 11, 2014 Home Improvement

Switching To Outlook.com

Last November, I posted that I was switching my email from GMail to Outlook.com. It didn’t affect anyone because it just meant that my @studio711.com email forwarded to a different site, but it was a pretty major change for me.

I did it in large part because I want to dogfood the solutions that our company provides in hopes of fairly representing them and offering feedback to the teams that wrote them. I thought it would be a bit of a downgrade, but wow, I’m really impressed. Outlook.com is a fantastic mail service. First of all, their junk mail detection is just as good as GMail. Where they really shine is their interface. Outlook.com loads faster and is subjectively easier to use, especially if you’re on a touch-enabled device. The web client looks and acts very similarly to the Windows 8 app so the continuity is a plus. I manage all my email in the desktop version of Outlook, but their web client and Windows 8 apps are so good, I’m thinking dropping the client version of Outlook.

This wasn’t the side-step (or even downgrade) that I expected. It’s pure win. If you’re frustrated with your email service or just looking for a change, give it a shot.

benmartens July 9, 2014 Geek

Yard Project Update 6

Tim and I put 2 more yards of dirt and leveled out the yard. It’s sitting for about a week to compact and get ready for sod. I got the fence stained (see the timelapse below). Don and Logan came over on Saturday to help set the remaining three fence posts. There’s one short fence that sticks out from the east side of my house with a gate on the end and then the other post was for the gate on the west side of the house. I got the short fence built, posts cut off and capped and started building the first gate.

This is an exciting week as we’ll be putting in trees along the back fence between our house and the neighbors (same basic type that were there before) and then we’re going to put down sod! The original plan had been to seed but given the small size and our desire to be DONE we are just going with sod.

I did some calculations and we in more than doubling the amount of grass we have in the back yard! The new grass area will be about 250% of what we had before.

Links to previous updates 1, 2 , 3, 4 and 5

benmartens July 8, 2014 Home Improvement, Timelapse

Organ Recital

If you came to our wedding, you know that we have some extremely talented musicians in our congregation. The lady who played the flute is in the Seattle Symphony and the man playing the organ just completed his Masters Degree in organ. He asked me to help record his recital, and I, of course, accepted.

The recital was held at St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle. I don’t know much about organs but this one looked and sounded very impressive. I overheard somebody saying that this was one of the most impressive organ installations in the United States though I have no idea how authoritative the speaker was.

The audio recoding was being handled by an audio engineer, so all I had to do was take care of the video. I just got the recording in my hands and it will take a while to edit it all, but for now I can share some of the photos that I snapped. The best way is to check out the PhotoSynth.

benmartens July 7, 2014 Music