I had a hard time thinking of much to contribute this week other than the obvious.
This is the south corner foundation of our home. It was the beginning of a building made long before we came along. It has helped us at the beginning of our family life. And finally, after living here for three years, it is beginning to feel like our home.
Please excuse the poor photo quality. It was taken on my phone in fading light = grainy!
Today I feel caged by the white pickett fence I worked hard to create.
Most days I love my home and its surrounds. I have created a sort of suburban paradise (at least it is in my mind) to dwell in. After all it is my work space and home. With a newborn and two other children under five it is difficult for me to leave this space, sometimes even for an hour.
Usually I don’t mind.
I photograph the flowers in my garden and my children’s smiling faces and I am content.
But occassionally the part of me that has been stored away temporarily while I choose to raise my family is envious of the photographers who can get out and find interesting subjects. People go on destination trips to exotic places with fascinating cultures, people, colours, textures…I could go on, but there is no point. Other people explore their town, city, wider environment…I’m stopping here.
One day I will do these things. I will look forward to exploring with my three young, ready made photography assistants. Until then I will enjoy my time with them and force myself to look at my immediate environment in multiple ways. Perhaps it is, after all, a good thing to be hemmed in.
I wanted to take a minute out of my day to say Merry Christmas to all my fellow bloggers and readers. I have enjoyed spending my year with you all. I have come a long way on a personal journey this year learning a new skill and I have found your friendship and advice both comforting and helpful.
Thank you.
I look forward to continuing to grow with your support in 2013.
After looking into the photographer that set the theme of merge this week, I understood it to ask to combine two things that might not traditionally go together and see what the resulting photo would be. I thought that was a GREAT challenge! As often happens I had a few ideas, none that were practical for me to achieve with my kids in tow in a week! I had to set aside my desire to find a couple getting married and ask them to go and have a coffee at a cafe in a busy street so I could photograph them and consider what I could actually achieve. I actually couldn’t even leave the house because it was pouring with rain outside and my kids would want to come. I had a look at some different photography styles to consider what I could merge and left my kids in the lounge room to play. I came back to a MESS! In the 15minutes I had done research they had played with EVERY toy and the result looked like a bomb had gone off in my livingroom. I decided to take a photo of the chaos from up high and see if I could turn them into miniatures like in tilt shift photography.
I had NO IDEA how to do that having only first heard of it in the 15minutes I was on the computer. As I always do I found a tutorial on how it was done here and set about turning my mini tornadoes into miniature.
To be honest if I had other options I would not be sharing this as it doesn’t really seem like a good photo or example, but I am a bit worried that with two sick boys, bad weather and a challenging theme I will have nothing done by the end of the week so here it is.
An average household scene in miniature.
I still live in hope that I can find a free minute and do better than that. I always live in hope.
I am…off to clean up the livingroom.
All of my photos pretty much are taken on my iPhone, mainly because it’s always with me and anything I see that I think is interesting in some way gets photographed. Sometimes they work, others definitely not. Sometimes I get frustrated because I can’t capture what I want and it’s a bit limiting with no zoom. Anyway here’s a few of the photos I took in the last few days that I liked for whatever reason. (sometimes I have no idea why I even like a particular shot!)
Learning the Light 