Each year I add to my Christmas decorations, just in a small way. I thought this little Santa was quite cute.
I hope everyone's Christmas plans are all coming together. We're just about there :-)
Jolly Ol' St Nick: Santa Claus | Kris Kringle | Father Christmas
Each year I add to my Christmas decorations, just in a small way. I thought this little Santa was quite cute. I hope everyone's Christmas plans are all coming together. We're just about there :-)
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Hospitality: Generosity | Warmth | Good Cheer
Not long now until Christmas and I'm in the process of getting all of our decorations, ornaments, and dinnerware ready for Christmas day. These glasses are good to go for Christmas breakfast or brunch with some nice champagne to start the day. I've been slowly adding to my Christmas collection each year and this year have purchased new serving dishes, as well as some ornaments. When I was putting the decorations on the tree the other day, I reflected on just how old some of the pieces are. The tree is relatively new and goes back to 1999, but a lot of the trimmings are from when my children were little - some 25 or so years ago. The years go by way too quickly, and I enjoyed looking back and remembering those precious moments. What wonderful memories have been created over that time. I do hope that you all have a wonderful Christmas that will bring you many happy memories for the years to come. Tradition: A Practice | A Custom | Heritage
We haven't really had any sort of Christmas traditions in our family, but I wanted to start one of sorts that can become something special for us. We've started to buy each of our children and their partner some type of Christmas ornament to build up their personal collections and to act as a keepsake over the years. Who knows, maybe they'll be passed on down. We are also buying the grandchildren their own decoration each year so they can hang them on their Christmas tree. We'll see how it goes. I'm not sure four boys will want Christmas tree decorations as part of their gift as they get older … or perhaps it will be more of a challenge for me to find something that will appeal. These two little musical Santas were from the first Christmas we did this in 2011. These are the ornaments Steve and I got for each other. Each family was also given something along these lines. I really should have taken photos each year of what has been given as I spent far too long in the shops today trying to remember what I had bought previously. Never too late - I'll start this year and keep a record. Something Hot: Fire | The Sidewalk | A Pepper
After being in this house for 18 months we thought we'd give lighting the fireplace a go. Of course we thought about this on Saturday, the day we had rain and had no luck trying to convince damp logs to light. We tried again the next night but the logs were still too damp. Seeing that today's prompt was Something Hot I thought I would make another attempt at lighting the fire. Success! I didn't put too many logs on so the fire only burned for about an hour and a half. It is cold tonight and it was lovely to sit and watch the flames and feel the warmth from the fire. I did find it difficult to get a good sharp focus on the flames as they moved so quickly so I think I might be doing a bit of searching on the internet to get some ideas of the camera settings that work best. I think the photo gives the feeling of heat and warmth and a sense of movement. And now I'm finally up-to-date with the blog, that is until next time :-) Night from me. Are you detecting a theme yet? It possibly might have something to do with St Patrick's day being this month. And tomorrow's prompt is 'Wearing of the Green'. :-) I think I've taken quite a lot of shots around the yard and garden lately, so I was looking for something a little different for this prompt today. I had the idea of picking a bunch of all my different herbs, tying them with string and then arranging them for some 'interesting' shots. Herbs do tend to start to go limp if they're played around with for too long. It was a shame that the sage that I picked for the photos had a couple of eaten leaves - I should have checked a little more carefully before I started. While I didn't mind these, I felt there was something missing and wondered what the photo would look like if I added some cherry tomatoes, just for that extra pop of colour? Sometime after lunch I braved the shopping centre to pick up some groceries especially fruit (Steve is home). Looking at the series of above photos again I thought I'd try something completely different with some of the fruit that I had just bought. So out came the fruit! I had a few tries with arranging the pears in different ways and against different backgrounds. I do like the lift the red gives. Next came the grapes. I placed them on the timber table table and arranged them so that I would have the red chair as the background. Then I grabbed a bottle of wine and a crystal wine glass and set up the grapes, bottle and glass. As the coffee table is quite low, Zimi thought he'd help himself to some of the loose grapes on the table before I managed to shoo him off. Crazy dog! Down to the computer and I was quite happy with a couple of them. Of course the problem was, as Steve so nicely pointed out, that I had 'white' grapes and a bottle of shiraz. Hmmm, probably not. Back to see if we had a bottle of white anywhere. That would be a 'no' and a bottle of rose muscat was the closest I could get. This is the photo that we finally decided on. And with that it's time to make dinner. Goodnight all! 1/500 sec, f / 2.5, ISO 400, focal length 50mm
Right. So I'm a bit late. This should have been up yesterday but I didn't quite get there. Never mind, I'm here now. Yesterday was my grandson's second birthday so I was waiting to get photos from his birthday for the prompt of 'celebrate' - opening presents, blowing out the candles, eating his cake - celebration type things. Unfortunately he wasn't all that well, and not his usual happy, smiley self. Normally when I take photos of the family I just point and shoot, but because I had this blog and the CY365 gallery in the back of my mind I was trying to be more creative. I discovered that it is much easier to be creative when I have a semblance of control! Trying to get a good shot of Hunter opening his presents with two very inquisitive older brothers trying to help (or perhaps it was hinder) in lowish light and manually focussing ,was more difficult than I had anticipated. I also think that I forgot to take my glasses off when I was focussing (I have set the diopter focus for use without glasses). The end result being more blurry photos than what I expected The next difficulty was trying to choose a photo to put on the CY365 page. Did I go for one that was compositionally ok, or did I choose one that had meaning for me? I ended up choosing one that had meaning. This is the photo I ended up putting up. Hunter just looovveeesss Elmo at the moment so he had an Elmo cake. Boy, did his face light up when he saw it and he had a huge smile. Because of his response to the cake I've chosen a photo where the cake is in focus and Hunter is in the background. Here are a few more taken yesterday. Looking at them again I think I should have posted the one of Hunter holding the cake :-) A Pop of Red. Red has to be my most favourite of all colours at the moment and anyone who's been to our place will know that I have a lot of red around. So for this prompt I took photos of my red kettle, red toaster, red shoes, cherry tomatoes, ornaments - you get the idea! While I was outside photographing cherry tomatoes on a white plate I noticed the bright red steering wheel on the cubby house and took decided to take a few shots of that while I had the camera out. Of course that meant I had to decide which one out of all the photos I took I was going to use. With Steve's input I decided to go with the steering wheel. To achieve this I de-saturated all the other colours in the photo and kept only the red strong. Perhaps I'll start an album on the gallery page for those photos that didn't quite make it :-) Oh, a few new flower photos have gone into the gallery as well :-) 1/6400 sec, F / 1.8, ISO 250, focal length 50mm
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ARCHIVE CY365 -2014
This blog started out to be about my first 365 day photography project - one photo each day - through Katrina Kennedy's Capture Your 365 challenge Blogs I followThe more I start looking at blogs the more I find that are interesting. This is not good. I can never remember where I found them. Not to mention how time consuming they can be ...
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