April 11 - Monkey Pen on Stage

April 11 - Monkey Pen on Stage, originally uploaded by wasabi_peas.

A bit more abstract on this shot...

This is a monkey-shaped washable marker for kids. It also cheeps like a monkey when you replace the cap.

See, when you are a parent, you fall for stuff like this. Sounds like a great idea, right? Easy clean up, AND it encourages little ones to learn to put the cap on when they are done drawing. What you are too sleep-deprived to consider is that they might just like putting the cap on, and forget the whole drawing step. Furthermore, you can't test it out in the shrink package, so you have no idea that it takes an adult to actually get the cap back in place.

So my daughter has a lot of ink on her hands and the tummy of her shirts (from trying to put the cap on) and I got plenty of times where a frustrated kid hands me the pen to get the cap off. And we have exactly one drawing to show for all this ink...

Back to the photo. Vivitar 285 on Cactus trigger, behind subject. Flash shot through a cutting board mat, and the whole setup on a melamine table from Ikea that you might recognize from earlier photos. I intentionally centered the flash but put the monkey on the 2/3 line.

50mm lens, set on the table, focused in Live View. Flash on 1/16 (manual). Chimped (haha.....no pun intended) until the exposure was right, but this required a fairly small aperture even at ISO 100.