If She Who Must Be Obeyed had come home an hour earlier, she probably would have turned around and gone back to work.

Instead, in keeping with the motherly tradition of following “I’m home” with a critical “What the hell is that?” whilst still in the entry way, she questioned why no one had opened the curtains.

I stated there were two reasons 1) it was raining so there was no sunlight to let in and 2) I needed the darkness. Oddly, this latter reason didn’t seem to comfort her.

I needed the darkness because this morning was an exended photo shoot of  pens and random stuff I plan to review and/or sell. This involved breaking out my lightbox–a Foldio 2 I got via Kickstarter–and testing the limits of the camera on my Samsung tablet. I almost broke out my tripod and DSLR but decided I wanted to see what the tablet could do. (This also meant I didn’t have to charge the DSLR batteries, dust off the tripod or wrestle with its aging parts.)

The Foldio 2 works well, but it requires the room be as dark as possible. That meant I kept the kitchen and variety room curtains closed and turned off all the overhead lights I could. Our youngest was practicing piano and doing homework and didn’t notice the darkness in the rest of the apartment. This surprised me as she usually has a natural scanner that tells here when is the best/worst time to interrupt someone else’s project in order to achieve maximum disruption.

After almost two hours, I emerged into the light with over 300 pictures. The next stop was to upload them all to my desktop and load them into Lightroom. That was followed by a brutal, occasionally depressing culling. The tablet didn’t do as well with ink swatches as I’d hoped. More on that in another post. I’ve scheduled other Saturday photo shoots, some that will involve my DSLR and the old tripod, in order to learn how to solve that problem.

The next step is to post the pictures along with some prices and sell some of the stuff. But I also have a lot more pictures to take. I just hope I can convince She Who Must Be Obeyed not to be afraid of the dark. At least for a few hours.