Photo of the Day

Today I decided that the photo of the day would be the kids with their Aunty Lisa (my younger sister) so I put a chair out in the backyard, grabbed the camera with the 50mm f1.8 on it and thought in 3 mins my photo will be done, then we can jump in the pool and have a swim. Well, what's that old saying, never work with children or animals!!! I ended up taking about 10 photos which took about 20 mins because Sienna was having a meltdown that she didn't really need to have. Then beautiful photo of 2 of them and the 3rd one eyes shut, next photo, beautiful picture of the other 2, 3rd person's eyes shut.......soooooooo what was meant to take 3 mins did take some time. Here is the only photo that is worth showing you but I do like it because it's James and Sienna with their beautiful Aunty Lisa who they adore.

Everyone has a thing, and Lisa's thing is to bring a packet of marshmallows with her when she visits. Yep, every single time she visits which is once a week she brings over one packet of marshmallows with her which gets divided between 2 adults and 2 kids so it's all in moderation but a lovely thing that she does that we all enjoy.

2009 Project 365 Canvas

When I started Project 365 at the beginning of 2009 I decided that at the end of the year I would get a wall canvas done with all the pictures as thumbnail prints. I had seen this on a blog back in 2008 and thought it looked fantastic.

I have finally gotten around to getting the photos sorted and taking them to get them printed. I received a sample print on canvas just to make sure that you could still see the pictures clear enough on the canvas given that canvas is a bit like material (threads) rather than smooth like photo papger. I'm pleased to say I was thrilled with the small test print and now the whole thing is being printed and mounted. I'm going to hang it in the entry way.

The canvas is quite large and is 12 pictures across and 30 down + 5 and a title on the bottom. The pictures are 4.5cm x 3cm each and now that the template is set up, anyone interested in doing this, the company I used will know what to do and it's just a matter of getting the jpeg files ready to go onto the grid. In other words, all the hard work has now been done by a local Brisbane company.

Knowing I was going to do this thumbnail collage I kept all my photos horizontal format so I could do the canvas. I'm hoping to get it next week as I'm very excited about it and it tops off my photo a day for an entire year experience. Can't wait to post a picture of the completed canvas.

2009 Project 365 final picture

Last year my friend and I completed the enormous task of taking a "photo a day" for the entire year. I was true to myself and on the day, every day took the photo. Becky Higgins Project 365 kit sold out in America in about 2 hrs and the $40 kits ended up on ebay USA for over $200. Given that the kits were as scarce as hens teeth I looked around for a different solution. I came up with idea to use the red photo box from kikki-k stationery stores which fitted our needs. The journalling was typed directly onto each photo including the day and date and then it was just a matter of printing it and putting straight into the album. I would edit the photo each night and then save it to my disk and the next time I was at Harvey Norman print a batch of photos.

It was a great project because during the course of the year my photography improved and I also got to take more photos of our everyday life rather than getting the camera out for special events, birthdays, holidays and Christmas. It renewed my enthusiasm for photography which I just love and my photos got better as the days went on.

Getting back to my final photo for the year I knew it had to be good. Remembering back to the previous New Year's Eve where my nephew attempted to write an M with the sparklers and me tying to photograph it I gave him a bigger project this time. That was to write 365 in sparklers. He had to practice writing the letters backwards given that I was taking the photo from in front of him and it had to be big enough to see.

My camera card was just about full from taking photos of a beautiful 7 day old baby and his family that morning, my computer had run out of disk space to download them so I was at a disadvantage to start with. We made lots of attempts until we got the right size number and they looked good all the time it looked like a 3 ring circus, with me instructing, my family watching and laughing and the whole thing was funny from start to finish. We were laughing so much we were crying.

We finally ended up with 3 photos of the numbers by themselves and then had to photoshop them together for the picture. I felt it was too much to photograph the thing in one go due to constraints like the sparkler running out of sparkle etc. and me trying to hold the camera on what was a very slow shutter speed. My nephew was the clever person to patch the 3 photos together and then he included the "Happy New Year" using part of the sparkler pattern for the writing. So for the record, I did photograph the actual numbers 3, 6 and 5 with sparklers outside but the Happy New Year is some photoshop magic. I was thrilled with the end result and the memories and the laughter from that moment will stay with me forever.