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?

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!

Another Layout

Since I was home with Abby today, I worked on another layout. What got me started was I FINALLY put together Abby's 8 X 8 album of all the pages I ever did of her. I printed them out months ago, and they just sat there gathering dust. So we sat together at the dining room table and I cut each one out of the 8X10 sheet and put them into her book. She kept asking to see the Santa one from 2007, I guess that was her favourite. I made some notes on which months I was short some layouts and one of them was September 2008.


I have many more holes, but I'm not going to stress myself out in trying to fill them all at once. One page at a time!

We are all feeling much better, now my fingers are crossed for Gillian not to get sick! Back to work tomorrow for me!