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!

The joy of giving "handmade" gifts

Well, my girls were delighted with my labors of love.
Megan enjoyed looking through her family recipe book (see my previous post: My daughter's recipe book). I think its purpose will really hit next year when she moves to the big city to live.
Amy was totally surprised and delighted by her camp photo book. It's not often you can sneak something under her radar! There were photos in the book that her teacher had sent me after I emailed him requesting the camp itinerary. As she flicked through the book she kept saying "What's this photo?! WHERE did you get it from?! How did you know?!"
You can view the book here (minus a few pages): Amy's Camp

And both grandmothers were delighted with their mugs sporting Megan's artwork (see How things have changed - or not?!). Neither of the grandmothers realized at first that the mugs sported my daughter's artwork and both thought we'd bought the mugs specifically because the hair style resembled their own wild gray hair!
I may have spend a ridiculous number of hours on these projects, but gosh it's lovely to be able to give a labor of love and be able to see it received with such delight!

Merry Christmas

Decorations up - check

Presents all wrapped and under the tree - check

House tidied - check (well sortof, just don't look in the garage, OK?)

Food purchased - check (but I keep thinking of more!)

Parents arrived - check

It's all go!

Merry Christmas to you all!

My daughter's recipe book

I've been working on this on and off during the year.

I bought an A5 ring binder and A5 plastic pockets. It is supposed to be a recipe book that grows. The A5 pockets seemed a good size for the handwritten recipes and clippings from magazines that she might collect.
I've printed a number of favorite recipes for her. There's a mix of her favorites, basic recipes and family recipes - from her aunts, grandparents and great grandparents. I've scrapped some with actual photos and original handwriting, some are from the Internet that I then downloaded and scrapped, some were just scanned newspapers articles and magazines. I've left out the ones that were just copied from elsewhere!
The cover is created using Wordle - I just pasted the text from a few of the recipes.
The dividers are from digital kraft papers by Katie Pertiet at Designer Digitals. The food decorations are mostly Microsoft wordArt, except the one with cakes is my DD's art. I've laminated the dividers so the tags stick out.
There is a big mix of products so I'm not going to list them all. But email me if you have a question!
Now to keep her off my computer until Christmas..!!!

How things have changed - or not?!

A parcel arrived a couple of days ago. I'd scanned some of my 18yo daughter's art work and ordered some cards online with VistaPrint. But their upselling got to me and I thought, what the heck... So I ordered mugs and a notebook and keyring as well. Great presents for grandparents and teachers.

So here they are, all the way from The Netherlands in only a few weeks. I was thinking how much things have changed, and that we could never have done this just a few years ago. And then I remembered these plates...

These were a Heinz promotion from about 40 years ago! I remember my mother unpacking the art paper and textas and my two sisters and I sat down to do our best art. 

That I still have these plates is testament to their durability and my inability to throw things away! I wonder if my daughter will still have her mug in 40 years' time!