February 2009 Archives

On Thursday I went out with my camera with the idea of taking original photos, because lord knows there's entirely too many shots of flowers and goats and chickens in my Flickr collection.

Most of these were taken with my Canon EF-S 60mm Macro lens in Manual mode, and I was really stoked with the shots I got of the feeding frenzy going on in one of the daisy bushes in our garden. Butterflies and bees modelled for me with not a care in the world (even with a huge lens right up close and personal) and if one flew off before I could get the right photo another one soon replaced it.

I also took a few shots in the man-shed/garage/workshop - there's lots of tools and implements as well as the obligatory dartboard.

 

Due to the screeds of spare time I have at the moment I've been able to dedicate quite a few hours to the large, continuously, never-ending ongoing project of scanning in family photos for our hallway gallery.

I came across this lovely old envelope in a tin-box of photos the Other Harf's mother gave to us. Those times of sending film off to labratories for days or even weeks on end seems so, so far away now in this convenient age of digital. Remember when you had to buy "film"!?

As well as the Other Harf's old family photos I've also been lucky enough to have some old family albums lent to me by Dad's eldest brother and was able to scan in pages and pages of photos, including one which I've never seen before of my great-grandmother as a child. Many of the photos need touching up in Elements, but some of them are still in great shape.

Mum has custody of all of her family albums so I'm fortunate enough to have photos of my great-grandparents and great-great grandparents on her side too.

These two lovely ladies are my grandmothers: Dad's Mum/my Granny Margaret ("Peggy"), Kiwi born to Scottish parents) and Mum's Mum/my Nana Marjory ("Marj"), who was born in Boston, USA, and emigrated here as a war-bride in 1946.

It may be the height of the summer and therefore not expected but...it is Northland after all.

I am thankful for the rain. It fills our tanks, it satiates the garden and the grass, it paints a hundred shades of green across the hills and the paddocks.

However, it doesn't stop two dogs from loitering in the study doorway, with expressions of eager anticipation of the daily walk that just isn't going to happen today.

When we went down to Raglan on holiday last month we went to the beach everyday.

In between swimming and sunbathing and reading my book I would always take a long walk along the water’s edge, dodging the toenipping waves and picking up and discarding shells for my daughter’s collection.

Almost everyday there would be a set of hoofprints carved into the sand, left behind by an early morning gallop, and I would picture the horse and the rider in my head, and hear the thud of the hooves and imagine the sea-scented breeze whipping the rider’s hair and the horse’s mane and tail, and wish that it could have been me, galloping that horse, on an empty beach, before everyone else came along and criss-crossed those prints.

In the furtherest corner of our garden there is a beautiful lily that seems to bloom all the year round, despite the ride-on mower plowing into or the weedater slicing at.

It survives the driving rain of May, the coldest nights in July, the baking heat of February.

It never gives up.

Oooh, how I love a glass of champers!

My husband; he knows me well.

In return I will be making him Fillet Steak with garlic butter with extra creamy/extra cheesy potato bake and Mange Tout (c'est vous plais) on the side, followed by Kapiti's Triple Chocolate icecream.

Ah yes, I know him well...

I found this on our bedroom windowsill the other day. Our windows are open for at least twelve hours a day being the height of summer, and it must of drifted in on one of the very lazy breezes that pass by.

This week's Superhero Photo Challenge: Abstract

Shutter Sisters want us dedicated readers to "capture an abstract image, either by photographing something extremely closeup or simply by seeing color and form in a new way."

Now, I've had my macro lens (a Canon EF-S 60mm) for almost a year now and still I find it a contrary little beast, by far the most difficult to master out of the three lenses I own. It's not one for the automatic focus, like the others, and is at its best supported by a tripod, which can be awkward when you've got your lens, your camera and most of your head and shoulders emerged in a flowering shrub trying to capture that ultimate shot of a stamen in the sharpest focus possible, with squadrons of pissed-off bees taking kamikaze dives at you.

Fortunately I found the ideal subject for this shot in a far safer place, and it was delicious too.

I photographed my very first wedding this Friday just gone. My good friend Ethel married her best friend and old flame Harold in their back garden with 68 guests in attendance, and I recorded the day pretty much from woe to go - Ethel having her hair done at 1.30 that afternoon right through to her and Harold unwrapping their presents at 1.30 the following morning.

These things I learnt:

1. When it's windy and humid, a bride-to-be's curls drop out in a matter of hours and the $140 forked out to the hairdresser seems blimin' ridiculous.
2. Don't leave the duty-free pre-wedding Dutch courage Moët in the freezer as champagne slushies are hard to scrape out of a bottle.
3. Leave the white chocolate wedding cake in the fridge as long as possible as heat and humidity will cause the tiers to avalanche.
4. The Ultimate Lesson of the Day: check that your spare battery is fully charged! Check, check and double-check! The gut-wrenching horror when I inserted it into my camera a quarter way through the ceremony and saw a blank screen in my LCD screen is one I never wish to experience ever, ever again!
5. How husbands are handy in such an emergency - mine quickly drove Ethel and Harold's neighbour Arnie up the road to fetch his spare camera.
6. That Ethel and Harold's neighbours are wonderful people; not only did Arnie save my neck, we also used their beautiful cottage garden as a setting for the "formal" photos.
7. My Canon EOS 400D takes great photos and a five year old Nikon Coolpix doesn't quite come up to scratch next to it, but hell, it was better than nothing. Nothing really would of sucked.
8. It pays to talk to strangers sometimes. I would never of known that Arnie was a fellow shutterbug otherwise.
9. Arnie has a Canon EOS IDs Mark II - Canon's top of the range DSLR with 16.7 megapixels and full-frame CMOS sensor but oh, the weight of it! It's so bloody heavy it needs a tripod for the body and one for the lens itself; definitely a bloke's camera.
10. Yes, as the How To book I took out of the library said: Great wedding photos about making that emotional connection with your subjects. Something that is so much easier to do when you know your subject well but...not so easy when you are photographing strangers.
11. I'm not sure if I could photograph strangers on their Big Day, and be happy with the photos I took...

Miss 8.3 and her crazy cousins went dancing in the rain last night.

Who needs a man-made shower, anyway?

The ground is starting to crack in places and the farmland surrounding our house is slowly turning from dull green to pale gold as summer cranks up to full capacity. February is the hottest month here in New Zealand, and as well as the heat us Northlanders have to cope with high humidity which drains you dry of sweat and the will to even lift a finger.

But this morning there was a misty rain like a tablecloth of fine gauze sitting over the hills and paddocks, cooling the air and depositing tiny diamonds of dew over everything it touched.

Within a matter of minutes the sun burned through and the diamonds dissolved.

So I've decided to pick "summer" as my word for Shutter Sisters' One Word Project; what summer means to me and what summer is about here in New Zealand

Welcome to Photografi! It's nice to have you here. As you can see, we are plum in the middle of a hole in the ozone layer at the present moment, so please ensure that you have applied the SPF30 to every exposed body part, unlike our model Pippa below, who will be paying for this spot of sunbaking later on, I can tell you that much.

So, the idea of Photografi is that I take a lot of photos, then I share only the ones I like the best with you all. I also intend on taking part in some photographic projects here and there, and have discovered some awesome groups and forums over the past few weeks and (thanks to the miracle that is broadband internet, which suddenly happened after my brother-in-law tinkered about with the modem last weekend) I can now fully enjoy the wonders of surfing Flickr without going and making myself a cup of tea in between page loads. Eureka!

Anyway, thanks for popping over to this here blog and do come back now, you hear? I'd love to have you visit again.