Paper Obsession

Time to finalise my portfolio

 

With only two weeks left of Unit 1 of my Photography course I need to start choosing photos for my Portfolio. Or at least finish taking photos and start choosing them. On Saturday we braved arctic winds to head into London for me to (attempt to) get some super-duper shots of street life on the South Bank. Not all that easy with two cold, fractious toddlers and one slightly impatient husband. The wind was ferocious along the Thames path and Charlie refused point-blank to have the rain cover on the push-chair. Harry obligingly fell asleep for a good hour so that saved the situation from becoming unbearable.

Looking through the 170-odd photos later, I found a bare handful of ones I am truly pleased with - and several more that could have been fantastic if I had just been a little more careful with my focusing, or getting all the important bits in the shot, and so on.. Howls of frustration!

I love this one Charlie - runny nose, chocolate round his mouth, looking cold and fed-up - bless him!

This is Harry doing his utmost to get lost among the crowds on the South Bank. Having been an angel for the previous hour (i.e. asleep) he decided now it was time to be a little devil. Clearly I have been experimenting with the soft focus and black & white settings here.

This character seems to be always here, pedalling like crazy whenever someone puts a coin in his tin. I am still trying to get that perfect shot. Maybe next time..

I am quite pleased with this one, the London Eye is so iconic - but that just makes it harder to get a great picture that's not been done a million times over. I'd love to attempt photos of London by night but with the boys to get into bed I can't see that happening any time soon..

Harry loves the hens

This is my second go at this post.. aaaargh! I will try and keep it snappy this time.

I have completed a scrapbook layout!

This shows Harry making a beeline for the hens at Christmas Tree Farm back in October. I was following close behind, torn between capturing him on camera and rescuing the hens from a vigorous patting. Luckily both Harry and the hens came away virtually unscathed.

The layout took remarkably little time (only a couple of hours) when I got down to it. After a lot of deliberating the night before, I decided to just Go For It, ripping and painting with gay abandon - very liberating! It might not be brilliant but it gave me hope that - one day - I might be able to scrap with a bit more freedom, without agonising over every part of the process.

As Shimelle says, 'There is no stress is scrapbooking.' I aspire to this, I really do!

Talking of Shimelle, I have just signed up to her Journal Your Christmas class. The idea is to document the run-up to Christmas and beyond by completing a page each day in December, up to the first week of January. Oh. My... How likely am I to complete this? I am nothing if not deluded.. But really, there is no pressure to do it all! I am going to try and get organised in advance, get the bare bones of a few pages together and get all my supplies organised, and then just do what I can. I am really looking forward to getting stuck in - reading the comments of others who have done the class before, it seems to be a fun and fulfilling class.

Enough for now.. I am itching to get scrapping.

A big catch-up

Oh dear, I have been letting this slip. I had a post on draft for a whole week but I have decided to start again.

Tonight was my second class on my City & Guilds Basic Digital Imaging course. I am really enjoying it so far, it's fun and I'm learning all sort of things I didn't know about my camera. Tonight we learned about Sensitivity (ISO) and White Balance. We also took photos of a whole range of cameras, starting with a pin-hole camera made from a beer can, a box brownie, a medium format, a cheapie disposable, a digital compact and a top of the range digital SLR.

The class finished with a display of everyone's homework from last week, namely three photos of plastic cups in whatever setting we wished. It was really interesting to see what everyone chose to photograph. Some of the photos were excellent! I printed mine on cheap, nasty photo paper which didn't do them any favours. (My photos were: one of Harry scrunching a cup, one of the cup filled with water in the garden, and one of the three cups in Alexandra Palace last Sunday).

Harry is not very well at the moment. He has just got over an eye infection but he is really off his food today. He is also very grizzly and not sleeping too well. Charlie is getting increasingly naughty these last few weeks. When we're shopping in the Co-op he invariably wriggles free of the pushchair harness then runs around the store as if to hide from me. It's becoming very tiresome trying to keep track of him while getting the shopping done so we can get out as quickly as possible. A lady 'rescued' him today thinking he had simply got lost. I had to explain that he had fully intended to run off.

Mum & Dad are coming to stay tomorrow and the house is a shambles. To do: scrub bathroom, wash floors, clean kitchen, hoover everywhere...... AAAAARRGHHHHHHHH!

The mere thought is bringing on a thumping headache so I will leave it there. It will all be fine. Really..

All the fun of the fair

This week Harry has been doing his best to talk, although his only recognisable words at the moment are 'cat' and 'car'. At least, we know what he means, even though both of these sound like a high-pitched 'gaaaaah'. The presence of either Poppy or any sort of vehicle produces the same excited response. But he is really babbling now, almost conversing with us in his own language, often using 'words' of two syllables.

Harry adores Poppy the cat, and she will tolerate him up to a point. But he is very enthusiastic in his petting and chasing of Poppy, and sooner or later she loses patience and takes a swipe at him. Harry is always devastated when this happens but he is never deterred.

We seem to have spent a lot of time at the funfair this summer - and especially over the last two weekends. But Charlie never tires of riding on fire engines, helicopers, trains and swinging chairs and we do love watching him enjoying himself.

Last weekend the fairground came to Ashburton Park so, of course, we had a little stroll round there for Charlie to have a go on a few rides. He is getting pretty confident at the fairground now - a far cry from his first, frozen-with-fear ride on a merry-go-round earlier this summer. Harry also had his very first go on a ride - the spinning tea-cups - with Gareth. He seemed fairly non-plussed by the experience to be honest. Still, by next summer no doubt he'll be loving it as much as Charlie does now, and then a trip to the fairground will start to become very expensive indeed..

Finished - A Portrait of my Home Town!

Tonight I have finally finished my mini-book 'A Portrait of my Home Town', a project I have been working on, intermittently, for months. In the end I decided to include only photos of Stroud Road, Ashburton and Addiscombe as the book was getting very fat indeed. I will save my Croydon photos for a second mini-book, perhaps when I have had a chance to find out a bit more about the fascinating buildings I photographed a few weeks ago.

I am especially pleased with the mini-book as I bound it using my not-so-new Bind-it-All machine. I have had the Bind-it-All sitting on my desk for several months, still in its box, just waiting for an opportunity to have a go, yet terrified I would make a hash of some precious project. Happily, I had no such disaster and it was actually really easy to use. Now I'm itching to make something else with it, and I have a few little projects in mind. Next project might well be a mini-book of summer flowers - I have a heap of pictures taken in the garden, Painshill Park, and Oxford Botanic Gardens which I want to compile into a pretty album.

Here are some photos of my first foray into the world of Bind-it-All.

Another new obsession!

This week I have done something a bit impulsive (this is not unusual..). I may, in the coming weeks, regret this possibly rash decision.. or it may be the start of something fantastic and fulfilling. I have enrolled for a City & Guilds course in Photography with the local Adult Education college, CALAT. Why?!

In some ways, this move has had a long build-up. For months I had been thinking of starting up my own craft business. Running scrapbooking classes was my main idea, although there were many other schemes along the way. I went so far as to book the boys into a nursery three days a week and open a business bank account. Then I had a serious go at writing my business plan and had a long hard look at the figures - and it just didn't add up. I had to admit, we would be in dire financial straits within a month! So I had to shelve my grand plans.. at least for the time being. I then considered working as a tutor for CALAT and looked into the craft courses they are currently offering. I was a little surprised to see they are running one scrapbooking class and several card-making classes starting this September. Clearly I'm too late to offer my services for this academic year but there seems to be potential for more classes of this type. So maybe next year. This would give me more time to get my act together anyway. But what to do in the meantime?

Browsing through the CALAT website, I spotted a few courses on digital photography that grasped my interest. I am always striving to take better photos and get the best out of my camera (a Panasonic DMC-FZ8), but I will readily admit I have a steep learning curve ahead of me. Now I could have opted for a five-week course on 'Making the most of your digital camera'. But then I noticed the City & Guilds course also on offer, the Level 1 Award in Basic Digital Photo Imaging. There was a free induction session on Monday 15th September so I booked myself on to that - just to find out more about the course and the commitment involved.

I duly went along to the induction session on Monday and found out that the course is Hard Work, but ultimately Very Rewarding. The classes are from 6.30 to 9.30pm on Thursday evenings, from next week. There will be photographic assignments to do each week. The course lasts for the whole academic year, a total of thirty weeks of classes. Students will have to prepare a portfolio of work as well as a class workbook to show understanding of the theory. Did I run a mile? No, I signed up!

It was looking through some of the current students' beautiful portfolios that swung it for me. I would LOVE to be able to take pictures as good as those! One person had clearly used his/her baby and other children as subjects - one photograph in particular brought tears to my eyes, and that was it. I handed in the paperwork yesterday.. so I'll be a student again!

I am excited about the challenge that awaits me, but also a little nervous. Will it be enriching, stimulating, will I stay motivated? I certainly hope so. I guess I'll have some idea about that after the first class next Thursday.

My latest obsession

For the last week or so I have been busy trying to finish a mini-book I started months ago. It was part of Shimelle's online class, 'There's No Place Like Home', which I started way back in March I think. The mini-book I'm trying to complete was one of the first assignments, entitled 'A Portrait of My Home Town'. The idea was to take pictures of your home area (I chose to interpret this as where I live now, rather than where I was born) and compile them along with your memories and stories.

This week I have taken masses of pictures of Woodside, Ashburton, Addiscombe and Croydon town centre, to add to those I took back in early Spring. In doing so, I have discovered beauty in the new and the old in my surroundings. I have become pretty good at spotting photo opportunities wherever the boys and I happen to go on our daily jaunts. The trouble is, I have so enjoyed discovering little gems of old buildings around me that I have developed a new obsession - delving into the past. I've found some great books in the library about Old Croydon, filled with fascinating photographs from the 1960s and even as far back as the 1800s. Croydon is now so dominated by hideous concrete and glass tower blocks it's hard to imagine what it was like in the past.. but here and there are intriguing glimpses of another world.

 

Why Paper Obsession?

I can resist everything but temptation (to borrow a phrase).. especially when there's a huge warehouse sale on at Banana Frog.

On Thursday evening I succumbed to the lure of patterned papers at 29p and half price Banana Frog alphabet stamps, and my little haul arrived promptly this morning at 8.35am. Incredibly we were all still in bed as the postman rang the doorbell. I caught him just as he was about to pop a little red card through the letterbox. They really don't hang about.

So here it is! I have stroked it lovingly but it'll probably be a while before I actually get round to using it. Tonight I have been working on October '07 of Harry's baby album. It's coming on nicely but now I'm going to have to clear away the mess so that we have a useable dining table in the morning. Oh, for my very own craft studio..

Harry walking - evidence!

I managed to capture Harry walking on camera today. Not a great photo but it is the first, no doubt of many. He is becoming a lot more confident now and can toddle for three or four metres before flopping down on his bottom. He is now starting to discover a whole range of new opportunities for bumping his head - the dining table is the perfect height for a good whack on the bonce. He'll have to learn fast.

It's delightful - but at times a right nuisance - when Harry copies his brother. At lunch today, Charlie was blowing the steam off his eggy bread (it's more of a 'fffffffffffffffffff' than actual blowing) and Harry did a wonderful impression of him. He looked so pleased with himself, ffffffffff-ing away with a ketchup-covered face and beans on his neck. Lovely.

 

Harry's first steps

Hooray! Harry is walking on his own! At least, he has made a few wobbly steps before grabbing my outstretched hands for support. He can do it, he just needs to keep practising and gaining confidence.

Harry is now twelve months and two weeks old so he has 'beaten' Charlie, who didn't start walking til fifteen months. Not that it's a race, of course. It's just irresistible (to me) to compare their progress.