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.