Have you ever read the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe? If so, does this remind you of anything? Or is it just me?
It didn’t click (pardon the silly pun) until after I took the picture but I had to stop to take one as the tree caught my eye.
Good morning Wordless Wednesday.
There’s still a couple of weeks of winter left but seeing things like blossoms on trees make me think of the warmer weather around the corner.
I’m glad I live in a place that has distinctive seasons.
Below are some more reminders of spring.
This is for Trish’s ‘Wordless Wednesday’ as she undergoes chemotherapy. Hi Trish xx.
I was on my way out to Pilates the other night and I make JJ lock the screen door behind me and I said thank you to him. He asked me why I was thanking him, and I said because you’re you. As I got into the car to drive off I realised I meant it.
He exasperates me to my absolute limits at time, but that’s one of the ‘joys’ of parenting is it not?
We have some great conversations though. I love that he helps me see things through a different light.
He asked me the other day what I see when I think of different numbers. I just see the number I realised. When he thinks of the number six he sees darkness in the middle and glowing red eyes on the outside. And that’s not a one-off, it’s just what he sees. And he sees different things for different numbers. WOW! Do other people see something else when they think of numbers?
Below are a series of images I took last weekend when he was on the trampoline. I bought this trampoline when he was about two and he’s just turned 11. I replaced the mat a few months ago and I’m really glad I did because he still uses it.
It’s not easy to put a new mat on a trampoline let me tell you. It took two adults a while and a lot of strength and grunting to get that mat on.
This photo one was his favourite.
The one below is one of my favourites.
It seems I have a thing for taking photos of trees bare of their leaves in winter. Excuse me re-using one photo I particuarly love.
This is for Trish’s Wordless Wednesday as she rocks that pink wig.
I’ve recently acquired an iPhone photo app called Snapseed. It’s brilliant, and is currently my favourite iPhone photo app besides Hipstamatic.
Below I’ll show three photos I took using the iPhone in camera app, and what I did with them using Snapseed. The options I wrote down aren’t anywhere near exact, or step-by-step because I can’t remember exactly what I did.
Using the app is very intuitive and there’s loads of different things you can do that seem to go beyond with other apps like Camera+ and Instagram do. For example within the filters it has there are a huge amount of options and you can spend ages playing around fine tuning your photo and this is why there’s no step-by-step because it’s a matter of trial and error. While editing these photos a second time which you’ll see below, I still kept finding options I didn’t know were there.
It’s a bit more pricey than other photo apps I’ve bought but I managed to snaffle it for free and I knew it was for free by adding to my wishlist on AppShopper.
Below is the out of camera shot of a thirteen year old’s birthday cake.
Below is the altered shot. I mainly changed the brightness, contrast and saturation, and added a border. These are all things I could have done in Photoshop, but I find I do a lot of my editing of photos while going to and from work on the bus now.
Below is an experiment using the grunge filter.
Below was a shot of the last leaves of autumn when I was out for my early morning walk/run and it had been raining.
Below is the edited photo which I cropped so the focus was the actual leaves. I changed the colour a bit too – they’re a bit more earthy.
Re-edited in Snapseed using the vintage and grunge filters (more vintage than grunge I think).
It was a bit of a dreary day when I took the photo below and I wanted to give it some pizazz.
This is the after Snapseed edit of the above photo. I’ve played with the saturation to make the sky a bit more interesting.
Re-edited using Center focus and Grunge filters – quite a different feel to the photo.
I find now that I have this app, I’m using the camera app more and editing them using Snapseed rather than shooting in Hipstamatic nearly all the time which I’ve been in the habit of doing.
My photo exhibition opening now happened just over a week ago and I think I’ve recovered from its preparation and the opening. (Read how my exhibition came about in the first place).
I finally got all the work ready. This is what I did, and I don’t recommend you do the same if you ever have your own exhibition.
I wanted to do it on a fairly tight budget because I know that to get anything professionally framed costs a lot of money. So I started collecting frames about seven months ago. I bought some from op-shops, I bought some new ones and I was given some.
This was great but then I had to work out what sizes to print everything, that is after I chose what I wanted to show. Don’t forget I had 365 photos to choose from. I asked for friends’ opinions then didn’t really take their choices into account because I hadn’t documented what they liked. I’ll remember, I had said. No I didn’t.
I measured the frames very carefully and numbered them and wrote down the measurements, except for the A4 frames you can see in the photo above.
However, I also needed to have mattes cut and because hardly any of my frames were a standard size I had to get the measurements for those right too.
Thank goodness for Photoshop and the rulers within Photoshop. For each print (apart from the A4 frames that already had mattes) I created a Photoshop file, put the photo in as one layer, created a ‘matte’ with another layer with pretty even proportions which then gave me the measurements of the photo size and the matte size (remembering you need the outside and the inside measurement). I was then able to get the photos printed and I gave precise matte proportions to the matte cutter. I was cutting things a bit fine time-wise then so when they said two weeks I did a silent freakout and realised that it still gave me two weeks to put them all in frames and a little bit of time incase anything went wrong.
If I ever do this again, I would buy frames and mattes of standard sizes so any suggestions of good places to do this are welcome.
I got my photos printed at Atkins. They were very helpful with some questions I had and their online ordering software is pretty intuitive.
In the meantime I got the bits and pieces necessary to put hooks and wire on the backs of the frames that didn’t already have them (not too many thank goodness), some acid-free tape and some other tape for some of the backs of the frames.
The Photoshop mockups for the sizes worked a treat except for one which was 1-2mm too big on the inside edge. I just got a larger print done which solved that problem.
I mounted all the prints and got some help from The Surfer getting hooks and wire on the backs of the frames and they were all done.
And there ends the bit that I would not recommend you do. The rest worked for me.
In the meantime I organised invites, got some help with a press release which I sent to a few places of which one online publication ran with, and invited just about everyone I could think of. I also printed out the list of work and prices, and a little card for each one with the name and the price.
As I’d been able to prepare the work without spending too much money, I was able to keep prices down for the pieces I’m exhibiting. I’m glad I did as nothing’s sold yet. But it was never my aim to make a lot of money from this. It was more a personal challenge for me just to have an exhibition.
All that was left was to hang the work. This was done the evening before the exhibition.
I’m so glad I got The Surfer to help me with this too because otherwise it would have taken a lot longer than it did. I had a rough idea of what order I wanted to hang things and that worked out fairly well and I had the right amount too I think – 23 photos in all.
The exhibition itself went really well. People turned up and filled up the space. I saw people walking around looking at the photos. Lots of people commented to me on their favourites. And one friend turned up that I used to live with in London whom I haven’t seen for ages.
I would have liked to be able to supply some free booze for the punters but because of the type of venue it is I wasn’t allowed to organise wine sponsorship and I didn’t have the budget to have a bar tab.
JJ came along and I made sure he had a belly full of food, and luckily there were some other kids there to help keep him occupied. He was great. At one stage I noticed him sitting down with a couple of other kids that he knows just chatting. Actually all the kids there were really good.
A couple of repeated comments from some people I invited to the exhibition:
I was exhausted at the end of it, but happy.
Oh, and I also put the photos up on Redbubble so if people want to buy a print that way, they can. (There are a couple of extra ones thrown in.) I don’t know how this will work but it didn’t take too long to do so I thought it might be a nice added extra.
If you’ve any questions for me please ask in the comments. Or if you’ve had an exhibition yourself I’d love to hear your story.
As a friend informed me today there’s seven more sleeps until my exhibition opening. As I write the opening will be nearly over.
I’ve finally got all my pictures ready to hang.
Invites are out and people are coming.
I’ve pretty much priced everything. That’s hard!
I got a great write up on a local website called Adelaide Tweet.
Read more about how social media helped me get my 365 project exhibition underway, and find out more about my photo a day project – Project 365, or as it’s known this year, Project 366 – the leap year project.
