63/365 – Huzzah for High Tea

This afternoon I was lucky to have my husband look after our poor sick little boy as I escaped for a few hours and took part in a “Mother/Daughter Hand Pampering & High Tea” Party that my sister organised.

She surprised us with a cute handmade invitation a couple of weeks ago and went all out today making delicious goodies and setting the scene with a mini nail salon.

(I took my camera along to take a few shots, but ended up frustrated that I couldn’t get more macro shots with my lens. Shall have to look into that  bit further.)

It was a bit like the blind leading the blind as none of us had any idea what we were doing (except for Holly, who really is too trendy for her own good 😉 )
The manicure begins and we figure out which way to stick on the little stickers…

Our hostess with the mostess pops a bottle of bubbly.

Champagne Cocktails… Yummy!!! Shame mine only had fruit juice in it 😦

Success! A finished French Manicure on my mum ❤

And now it’s high tea time!

My sister made an AMAZING array of delicious treats for us to eat – a pregnant woman’s heaven 🙂

Topped off with a super yummy chocolate mousse. Woooh Sugar Overload!!!

A really lovely afternoon spent with some of my favourite ladies ❤

62/365 – CSIO from Medieval England… sorta…

COOL STUFF I OWN – One Small Replica Excalibur Sword!! Purchased for our Medieval Wedding Reception as part of our cake design – “The Sword in the Stone”.
I am quite the fan of Arthurian Legends so Excalibur seemed to be the natural choice 🙂

Here are some pics from our wedding reception in 2006.
The ‘stone’ cake ended up looking NOTHING like we imagined, (sorta like a 3 tier cake covered in a bright orange blanket!!!) but it was all good fun 🙂

Instead of cutting the cake we opted to pull the Sword out of the Stone instead! It was no easy task… It was imbedded in three layers of mudcake… a bit like pulling a sword out of a stone for real!!

And then we tried to cut the cake with the sword… LOL also not an easy task! But great for a laugh and good memories!! 🙂

57/365 -Waterfail = abstract success

I spent a good 4 hours today as the Backyard Destroyer, crushing wasp homes, stomping on red-back spiders and de-cobwebbing the maze of white cotton like thread which has appeared over the past year. And all that was just in my tiny ‘fake’ garden which is only about 2m long. What a nightmare!! I swear the spiders are all attracted to it because the plants aren’t real. It was a huge job especially in the sweltering 38 degree heat.

When I finally got the mini waterfall clean and back up and running I thought it would be cool to try some slow shutter speed camera work and get a nice misty waterfall effect. More like WATER-FAIL!! I tried everything but I just don’t think there was enough volume of water coming over the rocks to give it any kind of real misty effect.

SO instead I tried the opposite. Fast shutter speed and see what detail I could capture.
And the couple of photos I captured were pretty neat. I do like me some close up abstracty images, so these work just fine for me.
All blogged out for another day. 🙂

 

54/365 – Light in the darkness

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.   – Aaron Rose

After what will be ‘not so’ affectionately known as ‘Gastro Fun Friday’ (yes my poor baby boy is still ill) I am happy to have retreated to the bedroom where solitude and quietness resides. Grasping for some sense of calm before what possibly may be another long night ahead of me, I have turned on the beautiful twiggy lights that live in the corner of my bedroom.

There is something magical about fairy lights, don’t you think? If I could, my entire life would be lit by them. Each one smiling at me in it’s own mischievous twinkling way.

They are Romantic, Festive, Daring and Exciting; and tonight they are Calming and Peaceful. Tonight, at this time, in this light, everything is extraordinary.

In fact, I think I might leave them on. 😉

53/365 – Bring back the smiles

As a parent I don’t think there could be anything worse than having a child unwell or in danger. And everything is compounded when they are an infant, as there are no communication skills in place to enable us as caregivers to diagnose and repair.

Our poor little Xander is unwell again. A trip to the GP today diagnosed that he ‘probably’ has a Gastro virus. “Probably’ because without those precious communication skills to tell us exactly where the pain is I think the Doctor was taking a bit of a stab at it too.

Our Tally this week stands thus:
Xander Partied hard at the Saturday night Gastro Disco.
Looks like Mummy might have been at the Monday night Gastro Gala, followed by Tuesday’s Big Day In.
Wednesday night saw Xander back doing the Gastro Gallop followed by a trek up the Thursday Mountain of Misery.
I think I’m dreading Friday.

So far Daddy remains unscathed (but tired) and who knows what baby jedi bean is doing…

The house is a disaster and I have about 6 loads of washing to do of bed sheets and towels and clothes – It is nigh impossible to get an infant to throw up in a bucket… just sayin’… And if anyone knows of a good carpet shampoo or cleaning agent I’m open to all suggestions!!

But the most heartbreaking thing of all? My beautiful normally happy baby boy did not smile once today 😦 He was definitely cuddlier than usual, but I would have given that up in a second for one of his smiles.

Ahhh Parenting. No one ever said it was supposed to be easy 😉

50/365 – Bitten

Have you ever had one of those moments when you ‘realise’ something about yourself?
Today I succumbed to the realisation that I am a lip biter. I wouldn’t exactly say it’s a nervous habit… maybe more like a concentration tool. 😉

The time that I notice it most is when I am operating the metalworking lathe at work.
I’m encased in my little plastic head-shield which creates my own “kirstmosphere”.
I can feel and hear myself breathe, even over the really noisy sounds of the factory in action. ( look, it’s me at work! I know … totally sexy right!???)

And that’s when I notice it. I will be leaning over peering at my work as it’s cutting, or taking some measurements and suddenly i will feel a tug on my bottom lip. What IS that???

Oh.. it’s my top teeth. Starting at one side and making their way along my bottom lip. Consistently gnawing.
But now I realise it’s a conscious reflex. I can’t stop myself. Almost like it has become my focus tool.
Not good.
No wonder my lips are always a wreck.
I think I need a new focus tool.
Maybe I should start singing more at work… if my lips are moving I can’t bite them… right? 😉

Just as an aside – YAAY!!! I made it to 50 posts today. Holy toledo…. a post every day for 50 days 🙂 I’m not gonna lie. Some days it’s tricky to take a photo and write a “story”, but it’s an awesome challenge and I’m proud I’ve stuck at it and made it this far. And i really love my self portrait photos today! 🙂

9/365 – Picture Perfect

“Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.” – Aaron Siskind.

If you were to ask me what hobby I really, really love I would answer Photography!  Of course I have stacks of other hobbies (with stage performance being at the top), but if you were to ask me about my “unpaid” hobbies then Photography would hit the jackpot!

I am definitely what you would call “snap happy”. Even as a teenager, back in the day of 35mm film, I would take my wee little camera to all our school events so I could capture memories of my friends. I have thought on numerous occasions how interesting it would have been if we had the technology that kids have today to capture all our highschool and uni shenanigans. 😉

It was only really when I bought my first digital camera (they came out when I was in my mid 20’s) that I really started paying attention to things like composition and lighting. And in a heartbeat I became snap happy!! The chance to be able to see your image right now and not have to wait a week for the roll of film to be developed?? Yes please!!!

I’ve owned several Digital Camera’s over the years (another story for another time) but I ALWAYS wanted to get my hands on a digital SLR. When I was pregnant we finally bit the bullet and decided it would be a good investment as our baby was only going to be a baby for so long, and i was going to NEED pictures. LOTS OF THEM!!

Best purchase ever – well, next to my iphone 😉

The only problem was that I had trouble getting off the automatic settings. Not that it mattered. My Nikon D5000 takes beautiful automatic photos, but I really wanted more. I wanted to play with focus and lighting, and well lets just say that in the past I’ve been a bit of a perfectionist 😉 (haha, if you’ve just joined me you must read day 1 of my blog to understand!!)

Everytime I would try to read up and teach myself how to use the different settings I would end up frustrating myself because i wanted to do it perfect and it needed to be perfect NOW!!

Which brings me to present-day. As a birthday present last year my husband gave me a one day photography workshop as a gift.

THIS was a very exciting idea. 2012 – my year of doing stuff, getting stuff done…. finally i could learn how to use my camera properly. Thus I began researching workshops in Perth.

But I needed an accomplice… and lucky for me I found the perfect one!

One of my beautiful musical theatre students Phoebe has a great eye for photography and thanks to the wonders of the great “book of face” I have been able to watch her shooting skills improve over the past year with every post she makes. One of the things I love about teaching my teens is the ability to impact on their lives in a positive way, especially self developmentally. This is why I normally jump at the chance to be able to do one on one audition prep with them, encourage and help them with projects outside of Shine or perhaps help steer them in a direction of self betterment with a little bit of encouragement as in Phoebe’s case. When I told her about this exciting venture she jumped at the chance to come along and so I got me a partner in crime!

We had a magical day! 🙂

Our workshop was run by Focus 10 Photography in conjunction with Code Lime, and was co-piloted by the dynamic duo Andrew and Serena. We were so incredibly lucky to have two tutors and a super small class today so there was lots of one on one tuition.

I have to admit… it took me a while to get my head around the different settings… for some reason I have such a problem with apperture vs shutter speed. I think its something to do with the fact that it looks like mathematics… 1/3″, f5.6, 1/25…. eeek it all looks so much like algebra it just freaks me out!! But by lunchtime I had it all figured out and was able to enjoy shooting the rest of the afternoon.

We spent a fair portion of the time being models for each other, so not only did we learn a lot but we walked away with some really lovely photos of ourselves… almost real photoshoot quality!! We may not be there yet but one day we will be 🙂

Above and below are a small selection of my favourite photos of our day. I ended up with a very modest number of 778 happy snaps total tally. I figured I wouldn’t bore you with all of them 😉 Obviously some are taken by me and some by phoebe, and where we are both in the shot… well that was just magic!!

Hahaha.. no really – that was Andrew our instructor, showing us how it should be done!

It really was a fantastic day – I highly recommend anyone who has the same issues as me to look up Focus 10 Photography or Code Lime and check out their workshops.

This particular workshop was held in the Swan Valley, a mecca for beautiful art and a feast for the eyes. Honestly in such a picturesque landscape and with the tips that we garnered it would have been difficult to take a completely dud shot.

   

 

So finally – a super big thankyou to the stunning Miss Phoebe for being my awesome companion today, and a huge thanks to Andrew and Serena… it’s only the 17th of January and you’ve just helped me achieve one of my goals for the year!! 🙂