Martin wanted me to photograph his fantastic snail.**(see note #1)

“Snails are not rolled up worms,” I said. “Have you forgotten everything I taught you about snails?”

“I will try again,” said Martin.

He then made a small trough, poked two holes for eyes, and added some gamepiece-people antennae.**(see note #2)

Iris immediately insisted she could do better.

She spent the rest of her session with Papa trying to take the dough away from him.

Soon after, Iris watched patiently as I quickly re-fabricated Martin’s snail

into a long-bodied, small-shell snail with scraggly eyeballs.

I sat it to eat at the dollhouse table with the dollhouse mama, then I went about making food.

She watched as I magically changed the snail into a lizard,

then she proceeded to practice dissection techniques.

**NOTES**

note #1: Actually, he wanted to photograph my fantastic frog.

note #2: Gamepiece person:

Papa & Iris solve some drainage issues at the southeast corner of the house.

Heather was a preschool teacher before she started having children of her own. Being mobbed by toddlers, she is in her element.

We took a quick trip to the farm. I took some photographs on the tractor ride back to the parking lot. Between the light shifting every 5 seconds and the bumps of the dirt road being greatly exaggerated by the trailer, it was impossible to get a methodically composed photo. However, this gave me the opportunity to work on my post-processing skills. I developed a new Adobe Lightroom preset I call “HDR creamy for bright days.” When there’s lots of burned-out brightness in the background, making hair disappear into the sky, it brings back a bit of detail. Under the right (or wrong) circumstances, it also happens to make people look rather pasted into an image. Here are a few photos:

This sort of recovery is only possible if one shoots RAW image files. For comparison, here is the first photo straight-out-of-camera: