Theme: Event!

Oh boy did I struggle with this one, since I really had no events going on this week. There is a Robin that I think sees reflections of trees in our window. It flies into our window trying to land over and over for hours. That seemed like my biggest event this week...lol. I tried to get some pictures of it but couldn't sneak up well enough with my giant camera. So a few more days went by and I kept walking around outside trying to find some inspiration. I looked the word up in the dictionary and pondered a bit more. I finally came up with a picture of my calender, because that is where I write down all of my events. I didn't want personal things showing so I decided to use my tablet calender where I have nothing in there. It took me many shots to figure out how to set this up. The screen on my tablet kept reflecting things in the house and that looked bad to me. Also the tablet by itself looked so boring and blah. This is what I came up with for "event".

This Week Is Green!

Unfortunately I have missed a couple of weeks :( For good reason, we are trying to sell our house so we can get a new to us house which we are pretty excited about. Our house was not really ready to put up for sale so it has involved a lot of work these past few weeks.
Needless to say the show (photo journey) shall go on....
This week was appropriately themed "green". With St. Patrick's Day upon us this week and the 5th year anniversary of my sometimes Irish and sometimes Scottish grandmother's passing it seemed appropriate to try and take some pictures of "green" clovers. We have a couple patches of them out in our grass. I looked through them and for some reason this one stood out to me. Warren didn't like it's look with the holes and such, but for some reason that is what I like about it plus the slight brown coloring on the edge. It just caught my eye out them all. Hope you all had a great St. Patrick's Day!

Week 8 ~ Awake

When I read the theme for this week a few things popped into my head right away. One was of the kiddos or the dog waking up. The other was all the spring flowers that have awaken from the ground due to all this unusual nice weather. I decided to go take some pictures of the flowers. Jacob was out there with me using the camera from his leap pad tablet taking all the same pictures as me. He was trying to get in all the weird positions I was getting into to get the right angle and grunting, twisting, and turning. He was so proud of his pictures, it was pretty cute. I am going to put the picture that I used for this week and then a few other ones just for fun, it's nice to see some color on the ground again!

                                                     The spring flowers are "Awake"

This week: Round

This weeks theme is "round". I actually had a picture I took a couple of weeks ago that I thought would work very well for this. Most of you have already seen this picture, but I am still posting it on here. I took this picture in the late afternoon on a pretty nice day in February as the sun was setting. The boys were making bubbles with there big bubble wands and I was snapping pictures like crazy. I probably took nearly 40 pictures of bubbles that day! I have to admit the reflection was pure luck, but I just love the way it turned out and how the reflection is perfectly centered on the bubble. This is by far one of my favorites so far!

Stop To Smell the Roses

I have always been very interested in photo editing, but never knew much about it. In my challenge I am seeing a lot of neat editing being done to peoples pictures. It is inspiring me to want to challenge myself to try and learn more and practice more of it. This is something I have always wanted to learn to do with pictures, but never knew how to do. I did some searching and practicing and came out with these photos. E man is a very hard subject to get good photos with as he is always moving and J man will only hold a pose for a minute. I thought roses worked very good for this idea and this was only for the practice, but still part of my photo journey this year.

Kiss...

This week's word is "kiss" , very appropriate! So the first thing that popped in my head was 2 people kissing, but that seemed so obvious for the word. I thought about the kids kissing someone or one of us kissing them. I thought about somehow incorporating Moe dog somehow. I also thought about Hershey kisses, but I didn't want to go out and buy a bag of them just to sit around the house forever. I did have candy hearts though, so I looked through for any of them to say "kiss". I was surprised this was really the only one. I have to say I am disappointed with how many of the sayings are only partially on the heart and how they are so faded, but I went on with it. I placed them on a plate, but I didn't like seeing the plate in the spaces. I had some heart sprinkles on the counter and thought how perfect to fill in the spaces. I really struggled getting my camera to want to focus on them. I wish the writing was bolder on the candies and I wish I could have gotten it a littler clearer and more focused.
Hope you all have a Happy Valentines Day!

Photo Challenge

I think most of you know that Warren got me a DSLR camera for Christmas. I was super excited, I have wanted one of these for years! I have been taking tons and tons of pictures and loving it! I decided to join a photo challenge the first of the year. Each week the gal that started this challenge gives us a word and then we have to try and capture that in our picture. We all put them in an album and people got through and comment and critique the pictures. Along with this challenge I am trying to take all my pictures in manual mode, it's a good learning experience figuring out all the right settings to get the composition and focus correct. It's been a lot of fun and it's definitely challenging me to take different pictures than I normally take. Anyways I have been talking to a few of you about it and since the group is a closed group on Facebook I thought it would be nice to have a place to put my photos for y'all to see them if your interested.

The first week I really struggled. The word was "beginning", the weather was bad and since we had just started, none of my creativity was flowing. Warren was changing the pocket door. I took a picture of him installing it and titled it "Beginning of kitchen renovations"
Anyways it's a pretty boring picture, but I do want to journal all this so at the end of the year I can go back through and see my progression.

Week 2 was "Local"
I must have taken 50 pictures of the Canby Ferry. I really struggled getting the correct settings on my camera to make the color correct. I think the Ferry operaters probably thought I was crazy. I showed up 3 different times to take pictures. 2 times on the Canby side and 1 time on the Wilsonville side. After that I actually rode the ferry back to Canby as treat for the kids for being so patient with their crazy mom!

Week 3 was "Entrance"
Unfortunately after both boys and myself having the flu this week I did not get this picture done :(

Week 4 was "Glass"
Oh boy I really struggled with this one. I drove all around Canby looking for a cool window or glass broken on the road or something glass that would catch my eye. I found nothing!!!
I only had one more day to get it done. I had planned on doing a science project with Jacob to show him how water wicks through a paper towel which involved glass mason jars and food coloring. I thought maybe I could set this up and get some pictures of the glass mason jars with the color in them. First I mixed the colors but then I noticed how neat it looked when you dropped in the color and it swirled around before it was stirred, so I started all over. I had to drop it in quick and get the pictures done quickly before all the swirls went away.

Week 4 was "Against"
This week I decided to look up the word "Against" for some inspiration. I got all sorts of ideas. Unfortunately most of my ideas I felt were either depressing or could stir up some controversy which I don't want to do with this group. I took a few pictures of my ideas but was not really happy with it all. Then one evening I thought it might be cool to do a picture of a hand signing the word "Against" but that sign involves some motion and two hands and then I though maybe there was a hand sign that stood for something meaningful or strong like "Stand up Against" but again I just didn't want a negative tone to my picture. That lead to me thinking of warren's hands against his guitar strings making music that the whole family enjoys.