Good good good morning

Most people have coffee in the morning to perk them up. I like to have coffee, too, but adhere to a rigid self-imposed caffeine restriction. I limit myself to decaf after experiencing several negative side effects of joe, the worst being that I consistently overwhelmed my colleagues with excessive chipperness and rapid-fire speech. I have those issues anyway...caffeine just amps them up to inhumane proportions.

So, while I don't need caffeine to get myself moving most mornings, it's handy when something steps in to start the day right.

Today it just happened to be the gorgeous light falling through the autumn leaves in the front yard of the guy across the street. I am a total sucker for gorgeous light. I found it when I went to eat my daily bowl of Raisin Bran (I'm all about the fiber now, you know) after my shower. So, picture this: me, in my bathrobe with wet hair, opening my dining room window (I will not shoot through dusty glass thankyouverymuch) and screwing on a zoom lens to try to catch the light. First I shot with my standard workhorse lens, but that didn't get me close enough and captured instead the not-so-gorgeous power line that runs over our sidewalk and right through the gorgeous light. Grrrr.

After debating how long it would take me to Photoshop the damn thing out, I remembered, "Hey, stupid, you have a longer zoom." My current camera bag is too small to carry all my gear (okay, most of my gear), and so I tend to forget that I have other lenses at my disposal. It's that whole out of sight, out of mind thing. The bag is big enough to carry the D100 body (which is huge in and of itself), one lens (attached to the body), and the kick-ass flash. I'm addicted to the flash, so it's been stock in the bag for many months now. Unfortunately, the flash displaced two other lenses: the longer zoom and the sweet 50 mm prime. I haven't used them in probably over a year.

So I dug out the longer zoom and screwed it on, and shot again. Passersby think that I'm stalking my neighbor, but if they turned around and saw the gorgeous light, they'd know exactly what I was doing.

I was trying to capture this: