Friday Photo Challenge and Layout Challenge #7

Are we at layout challenge #7?? (Not sure Beth can correct me because I'm sure she will remember) Anyway I thought since I was my turn I should post the challenge of the week. For the photo challenge, it will go along the lines of my last post: Use Back lighting to light up your subject.

The layout challenge will be to use a photo cluster on a page - that is a cluster of 5 or so photos. See this product here for an example: http://www.designerdigitals.com/digital-scrapbooking/supplies/product_info.php/products_id/7599

Now lets hope for a sunny week to get those back-lit shots... it just clouded over here...

Layout and Friday Photo Challenge

I'm falling a little behind on my challenges. I didn't post anything for last week's layout challenge of a photo one year apart, or this weeks challenge of using a photo as a background. So it's a good thing I had a 2 hour nap today, because it gave me some energy to scrap tonight!!

Here they are:

One year apart
(I'll post credits later!!)

Photo as a background.

Then for the photo challenge, Jen made it to shoot at your widest angle. I have a couple for this one:

@ 24mm (or whatever it translates to
when you don't have a full frame sensor)

@24mm

just to compare = @70mm

@24mm

For this week, both challenges will be connected. The photo challenge is to take a self portrait, and the scrapping layout challenge is to create a layout about you - could be that self portrait you took. A photo of your favourite outfit at the time or your favourite thing... but the subject must be all about you!

Bye for now!

Layout and Friday Photo Challenge

Last week's Digital Layout challenge was to use a mask. Since I use masks in basically every layout I do, I decided to take a mask, colour it and used as it's own element. Here is my page, can you see the mask??

It's the faint yellow flourished square
tucked in behind the photos and paper!

The Friday Photo Challenge (which is slipping far from happening on Fridays!! ha!) was Food. Here are my two photos from that:

Flour

Milk

I decided to go with B&W for these shots, because really, flour and milk don't really have much colour contrast!

We had a good Sunday, although not terribly exciting - with swimming in the morning and shopping in the afternoon. The black flies have started, but they aren't totally unbearable. I imagine by next weekend, they will be getting there. So to take advantage of the nice, bug free weather we went outside after supper to throw rocks in our stream. Fun!




Back to work tomorrow. Not fun.

Take care!

Challenges, Swimming and Lightroom

I seem to be falling into a pattern of only updating my blog twice a week!! By the time I'm done downloading my photos and playing with them in Lightroom, I'm exhausted and can't muster the energy to update my blog!! So I'm falling behind!

I have managed to take a photo a day (pretty much) and try to complete the Photo challenge and layout challenge. This week's photo challenge was to pick a colour and photograph it. I choose Green, thinking with spring here, I'd have many green things to take photos of. I went for a walk down the Meech Creek valley hoping to get some nice shots of green things and this is what I got: BROWN!

Ok, maybe a little green here but that's pushing it!

I should have chosen vibrant brown as my colour! Luckily on Sunday I got this shot:

For the Layout challenge, Beth said it was to use brushes this week. My creative juices were not flowing last week, so it took me a while to get it done, but once I did one, I had to do another one. Here they are:

I picked up a tutorial of how to make custom brushes
from patterned paper, and so it was perfect timing.
The brushwork on this one are the flowers.


For this layout, the brushwork is the "dripped stains" on
the beige paper in behind the photo. I LOVE these brushes!

I will post the next challenges in another post later on.

For the rest of the weekend we had gymnastics and swimming. The girls started their first swimming lessons, Eric went with Gillian and I was to go with Abby, but as it turns out I signed Abby up for the Pre-School A lesson, which means the parents don't go in the pool with them. I wasn't sure how Abby would take it, but typical Abby, she just walked right in there without me and did the whole class with no worries at all! And I just sat there like a beached whale in a hideous maternity suite watching her... fun! I was so proud of her. It was so cute to see Gillian in the pool too, nervous at first, but getting into it by the end. I wish I could have taken photos.

And finally I'm trying to teach myself how to use Adobe Lightroom. It's a very fun program, and typical Adobe, has a million and one tools and techniques to make photos look fantastic! It allows me to do so many fun things at a click of a button! Mind you, I still love using photoshop, I just need to learn how to use the two together most efficiently! And then get to work!! Right now I'm spending so much time fiddling with the photos, I don't have enough mojo left to blog... so much to do so little time eh?

Day off, Layout Challenge and Photo Challenge

We have a long weekend and thankfully the weather is supposed to be nice all weekend!! After this past week and or so, I think we are all looking forward to some sunshine and warmth!!

We had a fun day with a morning play date with my friend Joanne and her kids, we hung out inside for a while, then head outside, and it was surprisingly chilly in the morning. Unfortunately with our lawn not yet seeded and grassed, we had to stick to the driveway to play, which can be pretty boring after a while. Regardless, we had a fun visit anyway and next time we'll head into town to her place where they have grass!! :)

The afternoon was spent napping and playing outside again. Here are some photos to share which also coincide with Jen and My Friday Photo Challenge for the week: The sweet spot! For me it was my 50 mm @ f2.8 (but I used ISO 400 - does that mess up the sweet spot?? I don't know...) Anyway, I think most of these are @2.8. I did a little playing in Lightroom, not sure if I like it.. perhaps a little too overexposed.






Then Beth and My Digital Layout Challenge of the week: Use Stitching:



And a couple more I liked from the week for an added bonus:

Layout and Photo Challenge

A quick post to let you know what the layout and photo challenge are for this week:

Layout - use stitching in a layout. Very basic and vague, but Beth and I decided to keep it that way to not put pressure on ourselves...

Friday Photo Challenge - Jen and I decided on capturing an image in our lens' sweet spot, the place where we'd get out sharpest image. So for my 50 mm that would be at f2.8. It's generally two stops above the lowest f-stop of the lens.

Good luck and can't wait to see the results!

Concentration and Projects, and Friday Photo Challenge

I can't concentrate anymore. I think it's because I'm pregnant, have two young kids, work full time, and still have all the chores to do in between all of that during the week. When you take pregnancy out of the picture, then it becomes much easier, because I have energy, I sleep better and I exercise more. It's amazing what taking those three things away from you can do to your ability to concentrate. And really it's not only the concentration, it's the memory (mine is shot), my creativity drains out of me (notice no scrapping and fewer photos these days...) and mood deteriorates significantly (I'll save that dicey subject for another post!). It doesn't help that I read a million blogs (well not that many but enough) and surf the scrapbook pages at Designer Digitals. So that takes up a lot of precious time also. But when I do find a page or something I really like at DD, like this POSTER I think - So cool, I want to do this, it's so simple!! Yet requires concentration!! So last night I saw this. Opened Photoshop, created a new 16 X 20 300 dpi document..... and, then that was that... I realized it was 8:45 pm, I was totally exhausted from the week, so I resigned myself to watching a few shows we had taped, then went to bed at 10 pm. So another project for the project list! I won't even bother update you on project 365. I think I'll rename it project 25 (as in 25 days, hahahah!)

Last weeks Friday Photo Challenge (which I realized just now that I didn't post on my blog!!) was a composition one, focusing on symmetry or repetition. Here are my two for the challenge:




Oh... here comes Gillian, looks like computer time is over! Can't wait to see your photos! Have a good weekend.

Fun Beautiful Weekend

The weather was beautiful this weekend, no one was sick, so life was good! We spent a lot of time outside, which was fun. Eric tapped the trees for this year's maple syrup run, so I'm looking forward to that. Took a couple walks in the woods and it was beautiful! Speaking of which, Jen and my challenge this week was "beautiful". I didn't take my camera on my walks, so I didn't get any shots during that, but I did get these during the week:

I love our view it's always beautiful to me!

Needless to say - Abby - Beautiful!

And of course Gillian. Love this photo
(can you tell? I've posted it twice!)
definitely going to print this one for the wall!

This was taken today, while playing outside

This one I took yesterday, which playing on the cushions.
Her teeth are slowly coming it, but regardless, she is stunning!

Friday night we had a nice dinner with my parents. Hopefully we didn't tire Mum out too much. She is doing remarkable well for having a knee replacement less than two weeks ago. Hopefully the recovery goes smoothly!

And here are a couple other things I did this weekend. A little photoshopping with old slides:

And came across this:

Me: in 1975, colouring

Which reminded me of this:

Gillian March 2009.
She LOVES to colour!!

I guess that's enough photos for today! Happy Monday!

I really don't know what hit me...

On Thursday morning, I woke up feeling so exhausted! I didn't know what was wrong with me. By noon, I wasn't feeling to well, had little appetite, and just wanted to lie down. I went to visit my mom in the hospital later in the afternoon (she had a knee replacement this week), and I almost passed out while there. I thought it was because I hadn't eaten much during the day and had some blood taken for the IPS. I managed to make it home and we put the kids to sleep, and I crashed on the couch. By midnight I was throwing up. I'll spare the gory details, but it lasted until 5:00 am. I felt SO ill all of Friday, didn't eat anything other than water and Gatorade. I could barely make it out of bed, let alone downstairs to get something.. it was hell! Today is Sunday and my calves are still cramping up when I walk up the stairs and I'm out of breath when I do so, but I'm on the mend. The weird thing is that I have no clue what I got. Was it the 24 flu, if so why didn't anyone else get it?? If it was food poisoning I can't for the life of me think of what I would have eaten?? What I do find weird is that for each pregnancy, I've gone through this at least once. Is it some weird right of passage or something? Some way to test my body in what its going to go through? Who knows, whatever it is, it sucks!

Our challenge for this week was to include our husbands in our photos. As I was out of commission for 3 solid days, I didn't take too many photos this week! But here is what I have:



Here are some other random ones from the past week or so. Gilly playing around, first running - I know - BAD - but they just love to run from the door to the living room, and back. No blood yet. And pretending to sleep - love the belly shot!



I have some from painting today, but I'm in the middle of backing up so I can't download them yet. Hope to get some up later. Bye for now!

Friday Photo Challenge...

A few days late!! I started to do this post on Sunday, then was distracted... until today! oops

Since I already posted my flashlight shots for my s-curve photo I'll post something else for this composition challenge: diagonals or s-curves:

Library of Parliament ceiling
I like the curves and diagonals of the decor.

Other than the parliament shots, I didn't really get any other good shots with this composition... it was really a challenge! This week's challenge is to get photos with our husbands in them. I figure that I need to take more photos of him and really of us. Maybe that will be the next challenge - photos with us in them :)

LOOK I did a layout this week! It's been ages... it felt good to do a page, and I am so wishing I had more energy to do more... but I'm just SO tired!!

Because I could scrap all of these cute photos of the girls:

This page would be about Sisters

This page would be about how just
darn cute and funny Gillian can be

This page would be about how big
and beautiful she is getting

This would be a page about
Abby helping with the grapes

This would be a page about how, to Gillian's
horror, Bob the Builder is on and not Dora!

Off to bed...

Abstract and update

I have to say that this week's 365 challenge was really tested! I think it's because I had 4 days of training (Business Analysis: how to gather and document user requirements... ugh) which sucked the creative life force from me, big time!! It was an intense 4 day course (which was relevant to my job, but too intense for right now). So after fighting traffic to get home, trying to make dinner, putting the kids to sleep, I was so dead tired, that taking a photo was the last thing I wanted to do! But, on the bright side I did manage to get a couple photos for the challenge this week: Abstract. Here it is:

I took this of the backs of the computers
in my photography class.

A close up of a fleece blanket.
(It's ironic, Jen has a similar photo! Her's is a fleece sweater though)

And unfortunately that is all I have for abstract. And my photos for the other days during the week were all pretty lame, so it will be hard to scrap them, but I will...

Yesterday was a jammed packed day of fun. It started with Abby's ballet class. My Mom came to watch this time, so we stayed in the room and I took some photos. (note to self: must learn how to take photos under florescent and low light when action is involved!)




After Ballet, we met Shawna and Paige for lunch at Chelsea's Pub. She came up to Chelsea to be my first subject for a photo shoot. She is 7 months pregnant, so she wanted some maternity shots of her, to scrapbook later. Here are just few shots.




It was really fun, because Shawna is a good model, she isn't shy and loves to laugh, so you can say whatever you want and you'll get a laugh out of her :) I also found it to be a great experience for me as the photographer. I learned a lot in this short 1 1/2 hour session:

1. Black on Black doesn't work (duh), however, I like the effect in some photos.
2. I need a wider angle lens which has the speed (like they always say - you need good glass!!), next time I'll rent a wider angle lens, because while I loved what my 50 mm 1.4 gave it didn't have enough play in the wide-angleness!
3. Wait until the subject is bigger in the belly! I'm sure Shawna feels big enough, but she wasn't big enough to really get the money pregnancy shots.
4. Need a better backdrop system, this curtain thing just doesn't work for me!!
5. Print out a book of sample poses, and ideas so that when the ideas start to wain, and we are both getting tired, we can take a peek at it and get some inspiration.

Otherwise, it being my first time doing this, I was extremely happy with how they turned out. I got about 16 printable shots for a 1 1/2 hour session. With practice and experience, I'd like to get that up to at least 20-30 for a 2 hour session. Another positives were:

1. I loved it and can't wait to do it again, and again! And learn more each time.
2. The light in this room was perfect - I'm really lucky to have this resource at hand and that I don't need to worry about setting up lighting as well as a studio;
3. I think the shots of Shawna are beautiful and she'll have some great memories to keep;
4. She is willing to do it again when she is closer to her due date, so clearly it wasn't a total disaster for her;
5. Learned a lot, and have a lot of lessons learned to build from.

Anyone want to be my next guinea pig?? :)

Off to get ready for Vegas, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to blog for the next week. Can't wait to see what I can take photos of!