Yay!

Well guess what? I found out late last night that I won last week's photo challenge, for my photo of the owl.

There's no prize or anything, I just get to choose the next topic. But it's very nice to have my photo selected over a lot of other really awesome ones! I was starting to feel a little uncertain about my photographic skills, so it's a nice boost to the ego.

I've chosen 'Chaos' as my topic, as that pretty much sums up my life (and especially my house) a lot of the time. It's going to be tricky for some people I guess, but we'll see how they go...

It's also hopefully a sign of some good luck coming my way. My application (for the job I mentioned last week) is due in today, so fingers crossed for me!

I'll be back later tonight with a Sam post (that's if I don't crash out at a crazily early hour again, I didn't sleep much last night!)

Saturday's Sensational Six

Hi all,

You thought I'd miss another Saturday, didn't you??
Well, I nearly did. I had a very busy day today. Starting with a difficult (because I'm so unfit) but satisfying (because we made it to the top!) walk up Mount Taylor with Deb and Ollie, some digging out the back, and then dinner with some friends at their place (K's family). A lovely, but tiring day.

But because I am going to try and write a post tomorrow, I thought I'd better put my photos up today. Thanks to those of you who have left comments and sent emails; I now have a few ideas to write about.

So here are today's six:

A photo of Sam

I love that nearly 7 months after he died, I can still get the occasional photo of Sam that I haven't seen before. This one was on my mother-in-law's camera. Lovely smile...

A photo of Oliver

I love this photo. It looks like one bird just told Ollie a secret and he's passing it on.

An old photo
This was taken around 1992, when I was 18. It's on my godmother's farm down near Moruya (I would move there in a heartbeat, I love her property!)

An Interesting Photo
I took this on Monday when Ollie and I went for our huge ride. The lake was like glass. (The next two days were wet and cold and horrible, but Monday was great!)

My weekly entry into the EB photo of the week challenge:

This week's theme is 'sculpture'. I read recently in a photography magazine that you shouldn't just reproduce someone else's artwork, that if you're going to photograph a sculpture, you should try and do something different with it. So I came up with this. This is a photo of a kinetic (moving) sculpture down by Lake Tuggeranong. It's called 'Angel Wings' and it's by an artist named Phil Price. I'm pretty happy with it. It was taken about half an hour after sunset, at a shutter speed of 5 seconds, and has been processed a little in 'Lightroom' (mainly cropping and colour enhancing.
This is what it looks like in the day time (and from the other side):

Morguefile Lesson Photos

Lesson 3 - ISO

This storyboard has two identical photos taken with the lowest and highest ISO settings. You can really see the 'noise' in the second one.

Saturday's Sensational Six

Ok, I've got that out of my system. Time for photos.

A great photo of Sam
Here's the last of the 'new' photos we found on Samuel's phone.

Very similar to another photo. He must have liked this 'theme'.

A great photo of Oliver

For my photo scavenger hunt: "The eyes of someone you love." Taken on my iPhone, hence the 'graininess'.

An old photo
Sam must have been about 10 when this one was taken. Early on in the whole 'Anthony breeding parrots' thing. He has hundreds now!

An Interesting Photo
My alternate for the EB challenge. Taken on Thursday morning when I went down to the lake. It was -3 degrees.

My weekly entry into the EB photo of the week challenge:

This week's challenge was 'Perspective (lie down on the ground and take the photo).
So I lay down on the freezing ground next to the lake. I do like it, though there wasn't quite enough fog for my liking. The swan hissing while I lay there at me was a little unnerving, too.

Morguefile Lesson Photos

Lesson 2 - Aperture and Shutter speed. Assignment 1.

This is a storyboard showing the full range of aperture values (f-stops) on my camera (at a shutter speed of 1/80). If I had a more advanced camera, there would be a whole lot of dark ones as well. That's it. I'm buying a new camera for my birthday! (Shame it's another 7 months away!)

Saturday's Sensational Six

Things have been pretty, well, crap lately. And sometimes when life's getting like that I lose all my motivation and don't feel like doing anything. I must say, I had a day like that yesterday, with very little accomplished; and it's taken me a bit to get moving today too.
I still feel yucky, with a constant headache and that horrible sinusy feeling, but the antibiotics seem to be kicking in, so hopefully that will change soon.
But one of the places I do like to escape to is my little online world. I'm going to write about it again soon, but today I'm glad it was there.

So I thought I'd do my six for today. Here goes:

A great photo of Sam
On Thursday, when we got that 'news', Anthony and I went and sat in Sam's room for a while. I picked up his phone and turned it on. Months ago, when I'd turned it on there had been nothing coming up on the memory card. I had thought it was just empty, but there must have been some kind of glitch, because this time, all his data was there. So we found three new photos of Sam that we hadn't seen yet. This is one of them:

It's a real 'Sam' photo!

A great photo of Oliver

I love the look of concentration on Ollie's face.

An old photo
This is another photo of Anthony and I at my 21st. When I posted the other one last week, Mum went looking and found this one. I don't think I've ever seen it!
It's funny, mum said she at first didn't recognise Anthony. He does look very different now I guess!

An Interesting Photo
This is an alternative to the one I entered in the photo of the week challenge. I love how the tree with leaves seems to be 'reaching out' to the tree without.
This was taken on Urambi Hill, not far from my house (about 7km or so).

My weekly entry into the EB photo of the week challenge:

This week's challenge was 'Solitude'.

Morguefile Lesson Photos

This week was the last week of the first lesson in my 'Morguefile' course, so I haven't got any for the new lesson yet (it started today).So I've decided to show you another of my abstracts. You can view all the photos I take for the course on my Flickr, but here are the first two assignments:

Lesson 1: Composition

I love this photo. Everything just 'worked'.

Today was also the start of a photography scavenger hunt that I'm taking part in. Soooo much fun! You can see my entries in my Flickr photostream.

Friday's Fabulous Five

(On Saturday)

Once again I'm a day late, and it's the EB challenge that's held me up again!

Here they are:

A great photo of Sam

I think this was one of the last times he dressed up for book week at school. Samuel really didn't like drawing attention to himself at all! (I think he looks very cute as a pirate!)

A great photo of Oliver

This was taken when Oliver was 20 minutes old. So calm an alert (that didn't last long - the calmness that is!)

An old photo

In Merimbula in 2004. I love the look on Sam's face. I think this is one of the events that got Anthony interested in birds again.

An interesting photo (from any time)

This is one Anthony took in 2008. I think there may have been some bushfires somewhere or something. I love the light and the colour in the clouds.

My weekly entry into the EB photo of the week challenge:

The challenge this week was 'black and white'. I had a lot of trouble with this one. I had two alternates too, couldn't decide:

Friday's Fabulous Five

Geez it's hard to pick the photos for my five!
Here are this week's:

A great photo of Sam

Samuel, aged about 18 months. So cute! Such a big smile!

A great photo of Oliver

This was taken at the fete at my school last year. I've adjusted the exposure a bit, as it was a bit dark. Oliver LOVED riding the horse. He then went back and got on a donkey.

An old photo

Me, aged about 2?

An interesting photo (from any time)

Some tomatoes I picked a couple of weeks ago.

My weekly entry into the EB photo of the week challenge:

The challenge this week was 'graffiti'. I had a fair bit of trouble finding a photo for it. I don't really like this one enormously, but don't really have the time/energy/inspiration to go fiddling...

Friday's Fabulous Five

(On Sunday)

I know, I'm two days late, but the photo I wanted to do for number 5 (my challenge photo), was only possible today, so I waited.
Here they are:

A great photo of Sam

Samuel (and Oliver) loved playing with Photo Booth on my MacBook. I love this photo. We used it in Samuel's order of service, and I put it on a t-shirt for Laura with the words 'Llama Tamer' underneath. (You'll understand this if you recall what Phillip said at Sam's funeral).

A great photo of Oliver

This was taken last night at Skyfire.

An old photo

Dad and Ollie. I love the look on Dad's face.

An interesting photo (from any time)

Also from last night.

My weekly entry into the EB photo of the week challenge:

The challenge this week was 'reflection'. This boat was on Lake Burley Griffin last night. I loved the colours.

Friday's Fabulous Five

Over the past few days I've been going through heaps of old photos. Since we have had digital cameras we have amassed thousands of them (I'm at 12000 and counting in the iPhoto library), and then there's all the ones we took with our old 35mm camera. Samuel was my first child, my parent's first grandchild and my grandparent's first great-grandchild, so you can probably imagine just how many photos were taken when he was born!

I think every house has a box of photos lying around waiting to be sorted - I have several. So I thought while I was off I'd at least start putting them into albums or up on the wall.
I must admit that some of this is inspired by the passing of Sam: I have been scanning and putting all the files onto CDs and hard drives to make sure I never lose them, and I wanted to have more photos of him (and my lovely Ollie) up around the house. That's been a challenge in itself, as every time Anthony sees a new photo of Sam he gets upset (although he says they're happy memory tears more often than not lately), but as I have said before, I don't want to hide things from him, and I also need to do what's good for me.

So as you can imagine, I have been finding some gems in the collection. So I've decided to celebrate and share my photos by posting 5 great pictures every Friday. I've decided on 5 categories:

• A great photo of Sam
• A great photo of Oliver
• An old photo
  
• An interesting photo (from any time)
• My weekly entry into the EB photo of the week challenge

So here are this week's:

A great photo of Sam

This is one of my all-time favourite photos of Sam. He got the trampoline for his 3rd birthday (we were never going to match the house he got for his 2nd birthday, but this was close). This photo was taken not long after that.

A great photo of Oliver
I took this one of Oliver when he was about 19 months old. I was always captivated by those big blue eyes...

An old photo
Thought I'd better include one of myself this first time. This was taken for the yearbook when I was in year 10 at Chisholm High School. I would have been 15.

An interesting photo (from any time)
This is our dog Merlin, taken a few years ago now. We got Merlin about 4 months before we had Sam. He's 15 now, almost completely blind, deaf, stubborn and showing signs of dementia (he frequently barks and howls at nothing). But he's a good ol' thing. It's a great photo of him.

My entry into the EB photo of the week challenge
This week's theme was 'Myself'. The photo is meant to symbolise my current situation. The empty hand represents Sam and the other hand is Ollie's.

If you'd like to look at any of my other photos, they're on Flickr.

Reigniting old passions. Part 2

Photography
I've always loved photos and photography. Since I bought my first digital camera I've been experimenting a lot more (which of course means I've had to buy more data storage, better cameras, and so on), as it's much easier to experiment when you see which ones 'suck' and which ones are OK before spending $20 on developing!

Over the past few weeks, I've been visiting Essential Baby, a parenting forum I was quite active in after Oliver was born, but drifted away from when things got crazy around here. It's a great community - sometimes controversial, sometimes annoying, sometimes thought provoking, but always supportive. Even though I'd been away for a couple of years, I was welcomed back and supported by people who know what I'm going through.
Anyway, on EB there is a photography group/forum that I've just discovered. Some of the people on there are way more advanced than me, but it's a nice way to share/talk about photos, and I might even learn some new things.
I recently posted in a thread about my three favourite photos (that I've taken). It was very hard to pick them, but I think they are 'good' photos. There are photos I like more, but if I'm thinking about what makes a good photo (and believe me, I'm no expert), these are the ones I chose:

I chose this one because it's a nice portrait, and Ollie doesn't have red 'flash' eyes.

I took this one at Hobart Beach one early morning in January 2007. I love how the kangaroo is staring out to sea. It's probably not technically the best (in terms of light etc), but I love the 'moment'.

I took this one on my iPhone last week. I love that I've captured that moment before Ollie hit the water, but that it's not blurry. I also love that I can take a nice photo like this without a fancy camera and lens.

Of course, as anyone who knows me a little would know, I've always got the camera out. The kids in my classes over the years have always grumbled about all the photos I take (but I think they secretly like it), and my boys are fairly accustomed to me with a camera in my hand.

My next challenge is to improve my knowledge of photography. I'm going to experiment with exposure and shutter speeds and setting up shots. I'll keep you posted. In the mean time, perhaps you'd like to check out some of my other photos? They're on Flickr.

Strength

If you're going through hell, keep going. ~Winston Churchill

Many people say to me: "you're so strong". But what is the measure of strength? Is it because I don't cry all the time, because I can find it in me to smile? Is it because I can keep going? Is it because I haven't fallen apart?

Perhaps I am strong, or at least look it from the outside. I guess I am able to smile, to keep going. I think I've said before that I was afraid that if I let go, I would fall apart and not be able to recover, to go on. But I'm not sure if that's really the case.

Right from the start I was determined to honour Samuel, to remember him with a smile, to remember the happy things about him. Of course I'm sad, I've lost my son, but I don't think it would do his memory any good to fall apart. How would that honour him? On Essential Baby, one of the forums I visit from time to time, someone said (to someone else who is going through some grief) "live the life she could not". It's the kind of message that is given a lot, alongside the 'if the situation were reversed, you'd want them to go on' type of message. I really think there's a lot to that type of thinking. If we sit around, depressed about losing someone dear to us, then not only are we hanging on to sad feelings (instead of remembering happy times), but we are wasting our chance to have a good, healthy life. How does it honour someone to waste your life as well?

The other reason I appear 'strong' is for Oliver. He's lost his brother, would it be fair to lose his mother and father too, just because they can't handle the pain? Both of us have a history of depression, so it would probably be easy to fall apart, but I would not do that to Ollie. I will still give him the message that it's OK to grieve, to be sad sometimes, to talk about what's happened (and I will do the same, both in private and with him), but I will also make sure that he is loved and has a good, fun childhood.
Also, what would it do to Oliver's confidence, his self-esteem, to see everyone fall apart because Samuel is gone? Would he think 'I'm not enough for them'? 'I'm not as good as Samuel'?
No, there are good reasons for me to 'stay strong'. I guess you could say I have some leadership potential, and in this case, I'm leading my family out of a dark time. Someone's gotta do it.