First Full Moon of the Year

The moon was beautiful a couple of nights ago. I figured I may as well get out the camera and try to photograph it as part of my Photo-A-Day project. I'm really enjoying how this project gives the incentive to have a play! Anyhow, after 20 tries I got this:

 

I have actually edited this a little - sharpened and cropped. It was OK. I've seen better. But maybe those photos weren't taken with a base model DSLR and cheap lens like mine?! :)

It was fascinating to zoom in on my shot (you can click the above image to zoom in) and make out a number of craters. I then went hunting and learned more about Lunar Craters on Wikipedia. I also discovered that this first full moon was a significant one. In the USA they call it the Wolf Moon and the moon was also the closest it will be to the earth all year. You can read about that on the National Geographic Daily News .

So if you'd like to take a photo of the moon, you can follow these instructions that amazing photographer and all-round wonderful person, Katrina Kennedy, has left on her blog!

Here's what the moon looks like when you let the camera choose the exposure:

I quite liked this, too. You can't make out any details of the moon but it has an atmosphere about it. Perhaps what I need to do is play with High Dynamic Range photography (HDR tutorial, HDR Tutorials Roundup ). Wouldn't that be fun?! It will have to wait for another day (or year ...!).

Happy Australia Day

Just my photo of the day:

This is my dear husband (with a friend of ours) volunteering at the Rotary organized Australia Day festivities. The weather was perfect. He sold a lot of icecreams! We've been so busy with the girls for so many years there's been little time for volunteering. He used to do so much with the fire-brigade and other worthy causes. We're thinking it's time to do a little more for the community again...

Day 26 of the year and I have still managed to take a photo each day. Just 340 or so days to go ;) I've been learning so much more about my camera and about processing the photos in Lightroom. It's been a lot of fun. But I must admit I haven't done much of anything else!

The slideshow of my previous post will keep updating with my POTD as I add them. I should add a link to it on my side bar somehow. Hmm...

Taking a photo every day

I've had the luxury of being on holidays for the past few weeks. I have achieved almost nothing in that time; the house is still a mess, I haven't completed a single project, we haven't even gone away! However I have been having fun trying out a few new things with my camera and participating in the Designer Digitals Photo-a-Day group on Flickr. I've certainly found that a lot of settings I understood but had to think about have now become more automatic.
I've placed a slideshow of the photos I've taken so far on my sidebar.
So the next quandary is what to do with these photos. I'd like to print them. The possibilities range from

• print a photo book with each photo on a singe page (but 365 is too many pages!)
• combining a week's worth of photos into a digital template (but that seems to cause people a bit of burnout)
• combining a month's worth on a double page spread (but the photos end up a bit small)

I've gone for the third option because I don't have a lot of spare time during the school year. I've designed a template to use. I made the photo spaces portrait shaped rather than square because it seems to fit more of each photo without too much cropping.
Here is my template half completed for January. I've numbered the days going down the columns - what do you think about that?! Usually calendars number each row, but they have 7 in a row and this template has 8!

I'd be happy to share that template if anyone can tell me how to do that!