TP Photography

Yesterday, Mae had gotten a hold of a random roll of toilet paper that is our redneck version of Kleenex at the moment.  I was busy doing something and she was unrolling it in chunks and sprinkling those around the living room.  I tweeted that I should do something about it and Courtney from Click it Up a Notch instead suggested I just capture it!   Hmm...
It was an understatement that I was disappointed in my Leap Day pictures.   I have taken far better action shots - and it is silly that I failed to get my setting set before I let Ace begin that activity.  Just plain silly.   Shouldn't be that big of a deal, right?   No clearly I'm not losing sleep, but it was still a disappointment - and when Courtney suggested I capture the TP silliness - I snagged the opportunity and created another "Messy March" activity for our Saturday afternoon.   

I did a little research on the best settings for 'action shots'  not a lot of 'TP Photography' tips out there, but I looked at a few for sports and adjusted my ISO for indoors.  I turned on all the lights on, opened all the blinds (although it was cloudy and late afternoon)  I set my shutter speed to 1/1000, my aperture I set to f/2.8, and ISO I pushed it until the pictures weren't dark.  Unfortunately for the noise factor due to the indoor lighting and time of day conditions required an ISO of 6400 (EEK!)  I might have brought down the shutter speed a little been able to drop the ISO as well - but I'll play with those options on another day.  I didn't want to pause the shoot to adjust settings.   Ace was having too much fun.  

 

I cleaned up the pictures a little in Lightroom and did some noise reduction - I'm still a newb in that area of post processing and I'm self taught in between parenting, cleaning, and sleeping.   Also I have to say that the quality from computer to blog post is severely degraded upon upload.  Tips on fixing this are welcome, otherwise it's only list to 'seek and find out' eventually.  :)

I handed Ace a roll and let him go to town!   He needed no instruction other than the reminder that this was a special thing that he only was allowed to do when I said it was ok.   If he did it on his own ever, there would be consequences.   With the stern warning issues - the fun began post haste!
 

He got some good height with his jumping.   Mae cautiously observed what on earth her brother was doing before I told Ace to take a break and let Mae join in on the fun.   She had a blast trying to be just like brother!  She was rockin' an aqua headband that she herself had added to her styled look for the day - so she had some 80s punk going on.  Her expressions were cracking me up throughout the fun.

I gave Ace a second half-roll of TP and let him continue the tossing fun!   He had such a blast.   And I was having a great time capturing all the action and I snapped my all time favorite action picture... in fact if he was facing me more it might have easily been a contender for my all time favorite picture.    You can just see the joy and excitement on his face, how fitting his shirt says 'Blast Off!'.  

When the rolls were all done the fun was far from over. He began picking up the piles and tossing those about and covering his sister which she was ok with... most of the time.  Although she did come to tell me all about it a time or two.  :)

Eventually we cleaned it all up and now it's a bucket of kleenex.  If we weren't redneck before - we certainly are now - but now have a lot of exciting memories to accompany it.   Want to find other ways to be messy with the kids?  Click here!   This mess was well worth an hour+  of fun and only took about 10 minutes to clean up.    I think when I go to make snow - this will be the activity that I allow to help break up the TP.

And just because I love it so much....