The English version of this Filipino song goes, “Planting rice is never fun…”
It’s a song that tells about the difficulties of the life of a farmer, how one has to bend over the entire day, with no time to sit and no time to stand. And then it goes on to summon the listener to join in, to keep the industrious spirit alive, to continue the hard work in the hopes of securing a brighter future. Wonderful how the song reflects the positive, hopeful mentality of the Filipino.
Somehow, though, the true heart and emotion of the statement, sadly, gets lost in translation (boy, did that movie get the whole concept right in that three-word phrase!)
So. I love taking shots of farmers at work in the fields. Because the Philippines is primarily an agricultural country (“despite plans to turn it into an industrialized economy by 2000” ), it’s pretty safe to say that farmers constitute a huge part of the images that come into my mind when I think nationalistic thoughts. Plus there is something so humbling about seeing these men and women working hard to give us the most basic of our needs.
I remember in my first year at the state university, I had a teacher named Judy Ick for English 2. I will never forget her, not just because she gave me my very first grade of 1.0 (though yeah, that added to her unforgettable quotient), but mainly because she was totally cool. Back in the early 80s when teachers wore proper 2-inches-below-the-knee skirts and tailored tops, Judy came to our classes in the mini-est of mini skirts and razor-cut hair, shorter on one side than the other, chewing gum, smoking a cigarette, and holding a can of Coke. She was the epitome of cool to the young teenagers that we were. And when the EDSA Revolution broke out, she held our classes underneath the trees in the university’s fields across Palma Hall. And best of all, she was smart.
So how does all that relate to farmers?
See, a group of friends and I–there must have been 6 or 7 of us–heady with the youngsters’ typical bloated sense of freedom that comes from knowing you have certain advantages in college that you didn’t have in high school, decided to make use of that wonderful freedom to absent ourselves from class via the “free cut” route. We stayed in the one sorry cafeteria then, called CASAA (what it stands for, I cannot recall anymore, although I always got a kick out of pronouncing the double-A ending because it sounded so much like the then-famous weatherman’s way of saying PAG-ASA. And this, I do remember, stands for Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical, & Astronomical Services Administration. Phew, what a mouthful!).
So there we were, with our arms splayed out on the caf tables, chattering away and playing Pusoy Dos (poker, Philippine-style), when we really should’ve been in our English class. Just our luck… twenty minutes into class time, who came into CASAA looking to buy her regular can of Coke to go with the mint gum in her mouth?
I can still recall with 100% clarity how she looked standing there, staring at us, mouth agape. Wordlessly, she turned around, Coke can in hand, and marched off.
And we? We were as red-faced as overripe tomatoes, guilty beyond doubt. A flurry of debate followed:
– Should we tail her and attend class?
– No, what for? She already caught us cutting her class!
– But it’s worse to continue to sit here and play while we know that she knows we’re throwing her class away for a bunch of cards.
In the end we decided to follow her. In shame. And because we were a bunch of loonies, we bought brown paper bags for each of us, cut holes in them for our eyes, and wore them over our heads as we marched back to our classroom in a line. (And yes, the brown bags were meant to charm Judy Ick with a bit of humor. They worked. :D)
When we came in, she was giving a firm-sounding lecture to the entire class, and paused just a second before she said, “See? Here they are! These are the guilty ones I was telling you about!”
But because the brown paper bags worked their charm, she softened up and ended her reproach with these words of wisdom that I have carried with me throughout the years (and yes, I’ve told them to my sons over and over again).
She said:
You have to remember: when you study in this state university and you cut classes, you are not just wasting your parents’ money. You are wasting the money of Juan, Pedro, and Tomas, and all the other farmers who work long hours in the fields from morning till night, toiling under the heat of the sun, never stopping even when the rain pours down, just so that they can earn enough to send YOU to school while their own children sit in their homes, unable to attend school themselves.
(At that time, tuition in our university was largely subsidized by the government, and we had to pay a very very very small fee to add to it).
Oh yeah. It was the perfect guilt-trip laid on us. And it worked. I never cut another Judy Ick class again.
And I think I’ve loved farmers ever since.
*photo taken on the road during our trip to the mountains last week* more photos coming soon 😀 *
Okay, so I totally flaked off despite all my good intentions to stick to Project 365 or Project 52 or Project 12… and now it’s down to Project 323 for today (which is totally senseless, I know, except that it’s the date that this photo got taken). I got as far as 19 photos in January. Took more than that, for sure, and daily ones I dare think, but never got to save any as websized files since the 19th. Maybe I’ll go backward. Maybe I won’t. hahaha. Who cares? It’s all good! Don’t-stress-about-it is the name of the game! 😆
So here’s the one of March 23. Will have to find the time to post the first 19… and then the rest that came after.
Illuminate My Soul:
PS. Adobo Putoshop was Photo #032409. Yay! Got two posted! heeheehee!
Owing to some arm-twisting and bullying by my good friend Noel, it seems I have caved (for today, at least) to the peer pressure of participating in Project 365 (Quick, say that fast! ::peer pressure of participating in Project 365:: Now tell me, do your lips feel like they’ve just had a workout? 😆 ).
So for today, I’m playing catch-up and working backward on my photos that I’ve taken since the first of this year. (I knew there’d be a time when shooting in RAW would get me. It would’ve been so much easier if I just shot in jpg, but I just keep thinking, what a waste of pixels! … yeah, it must be photography pack-rat tendencies. >heehee< )
I’ve found a way to deal with the little nagging alter-ego imp sitting on my shoulder asking me “Yeah, sure, go ahead and do the Project 365, but can you sustain that for the entire year?” 🙄 Well, here’s what I’ve decided to do.
I’ve decided to commit to taking photos (as I really shoot practically everyday; I just don’t upload them into my compy everyday. hahaha! ). And… that’s about it! hahaha! I’ll shoot my photos as I usually do and not worry about whether I’m uploading daily or creating layouts immediately, as long as I shoot a photo everyday and upload them eventually. Now isn’t that much less threatening? (So take that, you little imp-on-my-shoulder! hahaha!)
Anyway… so here’s the first one for the first day of this year. I took it in that fab place we stayed in as we welcomed the new year. The teenagers and my sisters and brothers and DH were playing with sparklers and confetti bombs, and of course I just had to grab my monopod and shoot (Have I said that I am afraid of getting near any fireworks? tsk tsk. Pathetic=Me, right? 😛 )
I’ve always wanted to attempt to shoot a slow-shutter-speed fireworks photo, and what better time to have a first try at it than the first minute of the first day of the year, right? So, many thanks to my very cooperative subjects who obeyed without question when I called “Write 2009!”… here we go! 😆
(Bea, darling, this is for you! 😉 And for you too, Noel! heehee )
Photo #010109 – 12:01 on the First
(Click on image for larger view)
P.S.
I’d like to give everyone HUGE hugs for all the warm fuzzies you’ve left in my comments portion. Hearing from you really makes my day. I can’t even begin to tell you how much it means to me that you take the time to type in a few (or more!) words. Love ya, sweeties!
There are some questions that I received from some of you, and while I normally reply via individual email, I’ve seen in some blogs that the replies are written in the comments section too, so that others who may have the same questions can see the answers as well. Is this the right thing to do? What do you who blog do? 🙂
Anyway, for you, my dear friends, who asked me about stitching and the frame I used for my leaf-insect photo, I have the answers in the comments section here.
Now… gotta get back to the photos! (Will come back and edit this post to include the rest as soon as I’m done. )
I make daily resolutions (easier to do a check and balance that way, and there’s something very soothing when, if you find you’ve been unsuccessful with the day’s resolution, you know you have the option to say, “Well! Tomorrow’s another day!” a la Scarlett O’Hara 😉
Still there’s something quite auld-lang-syne-ish (okay, I just invented that adjective, haha ) about making the traditional New Year’s Resolutions.
So… what’s on your list?
Guess what’s at the top of mine.
Hehe… I’ve been oinking along since the middle of December, shame! (Well, I had to put the new weighing scale to good use, right? 😉 )
Seriously. Oinking. So this must be at the top of my list, most definitely.
And there’s more.
More walking, for one.
My 16-year-old son has been convincing me that I need exercise while respectfully omitting the “older people need all the exercise they can get” part, something I am grateful to him for. Bahaha!
Speaking of which, some days ago, my 13-year-old R –who’s a total movie buff–and I were talking about… surprise!… movies. He was telling me he didn’t want to watch some movie (I forget which one, but I think it was One Flies Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) because he couldn’t stand to see Jack Nicholson with hair (it was filmed in the 70s). He said it wouldn’t seem like Jack Nicholson if the guy had hair. ??? (Don’t worry, I didn’t get it either >teehee< )
So I said, “Why? How old was he when they filmed that movie?”
He said, “I don’t know, but he certainly had more hair than he has now. He’s really old now. He’s ancient! He doesn’t have much hair left.”
“Really?” I said. “How old is he now?”
“I don’t know… Old! Forty?”
Ahem. 😯
So. I must walk if only to prove my youth to my growing sons. Aside from the fact that exercise is good, of course. Especially in this ooooold age of ours (*tongue in cheek*).
Okay, so I won’t kill you with all the details behind my resolutions.
But I will just mention this, because it has to do with the word for the month that my dear friend Jes blogged about here.
What was your word? Mine was… tada! PRAY! Hence my No. 3 resolution! PRAY more! Don’t get me wrong, I do pray everyday. But I figure it’s a wonderful thing to do more of, and one can never lose by doing it more. I also truly believe that work done to the best of one’s abilities and offered up is prayer, so this is my way of reminding myself to turn everything I do into prayer. 😉
So. Five resolutions. Spiritual, health, personal aspects: check, check, check. I’m good. (I figured I’d stop at five. Five is do-able. Six? Seven? Eight? Too much room for me to fail. Haha! I’ll go the safe route and stick with five. )
What about you? What are your new year’s resolutions? If you share them with me, then we can encourage each other and cheer each other and support each other throughout the year! We’ve got… what, more than 300 days to make sure these things happen! Alright!
New year, new lessons: Stitching, anyone?
I have to say… I am totally a sucker for cheap thrills, and one of the biggest sources of thrills for me is learning a new thing! There are few things that make me feel more alive than discovering new things, no matter how tiny and little they are in the bigger scheme of things.
So… did I say I spent the latter half of the holidays (till New Year’s Day) in the southern mountains with my sisters and brothers? Did I mention that most of our time was spent exercising our jaws and stomach muscles? (READ: oink! oink!)
Anyway, we stayed at this fab fab fab place (and no, we don’t own it–we rented it 😀 ), with space huge enough to house 4 families (which we were), with an almost 180-degree view of the world’s smallest volcano and lake within a lake (it’s one of the places that author Patricia Schultz lists in her book 1000 Places to See Before You Die).
I was so awed by the place that I just had to take photos… so I took 8 photos of the view as you come down the stairs from the entry, knowing at the back of my mind that Photoshop would help me stitch them together. I’d never attempted to use Photomerge in the past; in the past I had always stitched photos by hand (Riiiight. That makes it sound a bit like doing a cross-stitch sampler, doesn’t it? 😛 ).
So I tried Photomerge for the first time last night, and oh, boy, I hafta say… it’s the *easiest* and most thrilling thing to do! Loooove how Photoshop takes all the hard work and does it for you! The only thing you need to do is (1) have enough RAM; and (2) know how to fill in the missing places once the photos have been stitched together (something that can be accomplished with the clone tool).
So. I began with 8 photos and ended up with this one:
(You can click on the image if you want a larger view. Originally, this photo was roughly 12+ inches by 36+ inches after stitching. I reduced it to about 8×26 in).
I promised some of my girlfriends that I’d share how I stitched this together (it’s really easy, and I so love sharing easy stuff!) Note: I use CS3, so am so sorry if you use PSE, but I’m totally in the dark as to whether Photoshop Elements 7 has this function as well or not. 😳
Here’s how to do it with CS3:
1. Open your photos that you want to stitch into a single panoramic photo.
2. Drag your photos onto a single document. Make sure that you hold down Shift as you drag in each photo so that it comes in centered on your document space. It doesn’t matter if on your layers palette you notice transparent spaces on some layers as a couple of photos end up in different areas of the total document size. As long as they’re centered when they come in, you’re good to go.
I used one of the photos as my base document and then saved it under a different name so that I don’t write over the original photo. It’s important to ensure that none of the photos save for the background layer is locked. Otherwise the photomerge function won’t work.
It might be good to note, too, that if you’re pulling photos straight out of your camera and you shoot in super fine mode or whatever the highest quality of your images are in your camera, you’re going to end up hogging the memory of your compy… so ideally you’d want to ensure that you have enough RAM to work with (if your RAM is limited, you’ll probably want to close other open documents and programs while you’re stitching).
Since I shoot 98% of the time in RAW, I first saved all my photos (without post-processing them) as jpegs. I post-processed at the end, after the photos were stitched.
3. Once you have all your photos in the single document, shift-click on the top and bottom layers to select all of them (they should all show up highlighted on your layers palette).
4. Go to Edit > Auto-Align Layers > Auto. You’ll get four options (Auto, Perspective, Cylindrical, Reposition Only) in the popup menu… I chose Auto. Guess what. I ended up with a stitched photo that looked like the Cylindrical option icon. I guess Auto makes the best decisions for you, which is a great way to do away with all the guesswork!
5. Wait while Photoshop does all the work. Go get yourself a cup of cafe moccha, or maybe munch on some Royce Potato Chip Chocolates (ha! Now you know what I was doing)… because depending on the number of photos you’re stitching together and your RAM, and oh yes, your patience level as well, this is going to take a bit of time.
6. When you come back, munching and sipping, you’ll be delighted to see on your monitor that Photoshop has done all the hard work for you.
Initially I started out with 14 photos to stitch, actually. There were some similar views, so when my stitched panorama came out, some of it looked a bit wonky. Not a problem. I found the layers that those almost-duplicate photos were on and deleted them from the layers palette.
It also helps to know before you take the photo that you’ll want to take each series of photos from the same height, more or less, if you’re planning to stitch them. (So, ideally, if I wanted a shot of the entire window view, I should’ve used a tripod, moving from left to right as I shot the photos… then to get the roof area, I would’ve tilted my camera on my tripod, again shooting from left to right. That way, I wouldn’t have ended up with huge gaps on my stitched photo and would have probably not needed to do any work with the clone stamp tool. But that’s in retrospect. For next time. 😉
Now you might find that your photos look a bit strange with different shades on them (assuming you didn’t do any post-processing beforehand); if this happens, worry not! Photoshop, our dear friend, will take care of that for you too! Here’s how:
7.With all your layers still highlighted on your layers palette, go to Edit > Auto-Blend Layers.
Wait patiently, knowing that this will take significantly less time than the stitching did a few minutes ago.
Blink your eyes a few times, and voila! MAGIC! The white balance and all the shades on your photos will be blended so they look … PERFECT! Or… sometimes, almost perfect, in case you end up with some transparent areas on the sides of your stitched photo.
Now what to do if you a less-than-perfect panoramic photo with some gaps on its sides on your monitor, same as the one I found on mine? (hehe. Don’t you just love experimenting? You learn a lot that way! LOL) Again, no worries! 😀 Paint in the missing parts with your clone stamp tool. That should take you longer than the stitching process… but since the stitching is the harder part of it, and Photoshop has done it all for you, what’s there to grumble about with the clone stamp tool at one’s disposal, right? heehee.
9. Do whatever post-processing you wantto do with your photos, in case you shot in RAW, and voila! Perfect panoramic photo! YAY!
Now, for a bit more about the scene on my stitched photo:
This house was awesome (as you can probably tell, since I’m still raving about it a couple of paragraphs down this post.)
You enter through a gate and drive down a relatively short path till you get to the front door and the rooftop deck where you can host parties and get-togethers (as long as there’s no slight drizzle) and have a 360º view of the landscape.
You enter through a massive wooden door and go down a couple of flights of stone steps and enter a huge place where you have a split-level living area connected to the dining area with an equally huge kitchen right beside the dining area.
There are four huge bedrooms with their own bath/washrooms (perfect to house my little family and my sisters’ families… we moved in for New Year’s Eve as we had been staying at our own place in the country club earlier).
Then there’s a nice little pool which the teenagers were the only ones brave enough to dip into (cold winds, cold water? No, thanks!). Beside the pool area, with its uber-lush pine trees on one side, is a viewing deck from which you can marvel at nature’s wonders… and if you fancy a warm adventure with water but without the biting wind, there’s a sauna/hot bath a few garden steps below (I wasn’t brave enough to try that either… because it involves getting out into the cold winds before you get back to the house, haha!)
Surrounded by nature on all fronts, thank goodness we only encountered this little fella in the garden:
Well, whaddayaknow? A visit from one of those leaf insects that you see on the pages of National Geographic. I normally don’t like bugs (hate, hate, hate cockroaches… you can’t even get me to squish one. Ugh, that awful crunch as you smack them–notice I say “you” smack them because I’ll be the one running in the other direction at 200mph. And they fly! And they bite! And they stink! Uggggh. Shudder.)
But this is no roach. So okay, I’m fine with this, and I can stick around long enough to take its photo. Since we were in the mountains, I only had one lens with me (my lucky brother brought his macro… I’d love to see how his photos turned out!). I wonder how the poor insect felt with all those lenses a million times larger than him, all aimed at his little body. My nephew “held” the insect on his old and tattered book, and it crawled onto the ledge long enough for us to shoot a few more frames till my sister said “Eeeek! Get it out now!” End of photo session. 😆
One more time, up close, sans macro:
Recalling the Resolutions (Do you feel the freebie coming? :D)
What was No. 4? Create weekly? Let’s take that resolution seriously today, and let’s see what we’ve got here:
Oooh! A freebie! 😆
But first, I want to say THANK YOU to all of you for your warm fuzzies and for sharing with me how you’ll be doing Project 365 (or some variation of it). The 12 on 12s is a great idea! I have to admit that I’m still sitting on the fence on this one, wondering if I’ll end up doing a daily (20% chance), weekly (40% chance), or a monthly (40% chance) project. I’m wondering: if I just upload my daily photos onto my blog, does that count? ROFL. (Oh man. I so feel like Charlie Brown right now, sitting on the playground bench, watching everyone play and wondering what to do next. bwahahaha)
So anyway. You know how there are ten million options open to everyone, and anyone can do what their heart desires, right? (That’s what I love about scrapbooking and art and creating! There are no hard and fast rules! Just create! And have fun!)
One of these many options I’ve heard about is this other easy approach to housing and documenting the photos, which involves using a 4×6 slip-in photo album and turning it into a scrapbook (think: you have the option to put in photos or journaling tags or digitally scrapbooked 4×6 pages, or whatever you fancy!). Have you heard about this?
Personally I love the square size of 8×8’s so I probably won’t be attempting this anytime soon (and need a reason to use all the Bind-It-All schtuff I ordered! :D). But I can imagine wanting to try this approach one day. So for those who are doing this approach now, and for those who are doing the regular 12×12 or 8.5×11 or 8×8 or whatever size pages, this freebie mini is for you and you and you! Anyone can use it!
I made this chipboard journaling tag, with rubbed-on designs, which you can use for Project 365 or anything else, really. (It just came in really handy for jotting my resolutions on, haha!) And it’s sized at 4×6, so if you want to go the hybrid route and print this out and write on it, and then slip it into your 4×6 album pocket-pages, or attach it to your cardstock, you can! Or if you want to digitally attach it to your purely digital layout, you can too! (I didn’t include shadows so that you have total freedom with how you want to position it on your layout and where you want the lighting effects to be).
Click on the image to download. And thank you so much for the love you leave as you download. 🙂
I’ll be back soon with more photos to share… for now, I have to get to tutoring the kids with their homework, and doing my own homework as well! 😉
And forgive me for being absent for such a long time! In my part of the world, the Christmas season is the biggest feast/festival/fiesta (as the Christmas carols playing on the airwaves as early as September would prove), and the number of parties and reunions and out-of-town trips increase tenfold! So yeah, I was pretty much buried under piles of Christmas lists, then Christmas wrappers and tape, then Christmas parties and reunions–and along with that, Christmas food (which is now safely tucked away in my stomach, thank you very much, BURP!)… and whatever time left over that I’ve been able to grab, I’ve spent working on a “couple” of things that have to remain a secret right now but which I’ll definitely share with you come mid-January 😉
So… for the meantime, I thought I’d share with you some photographic evidence that I have not been lying around doing nothing but filling my mouth with holiday goodies (uh… more like moving around doing a lot while filling my mouth with holiday goodies, heehee!) 😆
Wrapping Fury
Quick, answer this question: How many Christmas gifts did you wrap? You know? Well, I salute you! I bow to you! Because I can never count the total number of gifts I wrap each year; all I know is that if I seem to disappear for a few weeks during the holiday season, all anyone needs to do is wade through mounds of wrapper and tape and boxes and voila! You’ll find me buried under them, trying to work my way up. 😛
This year, I *did* attempt to count the gifts I wrapped… at least the ones for my sons’ teachers. I have to confess, though, that I lost count somewhere between 25 and 40. Multiply 4 kids in 4 different levels in 3 different schools, with a different teacher for each subject, then add the teacher aides and security guards, and you have… how many? See what I mean? 😆
So here’s the photo of this year’s bunch of teachers’ gifts:
And because gifts need a home… in comes the tree! 😀
The Tree Boys
One of the really great things about having five boys is that you eventually get to the point where you can assign certain duties to them, such as putting up the tree! 😀 Every year, we put up the tree on the weekend of December 8th (Feast of the Immaculate Conception, which also means that most schools give the kids the day off… so in our home, that means the kids have the entire day to hang out and put up the Christmas decorations!)
This year we deliberately kept the home decor simple, since we had men working on the annex that we’re attaching to our home (read: breaking down the wall to connect another unit and completely remodeling said unit). The work isn’t done yet, and I think it’s safe to say it’ll take us about 3-6 months to really fix up the unit (we’re changing all the bathrooms, installing blinds in all the rooms, putting in new furniture, etc. etc. etc.–you get the picture. 🙂 ).
So anyway, that explains why the Main Thing this year was our tree!
There are few things that beat the joy of watching one’s kids help each other trim a tree, don’t you think?
My eldest helping my youngest… mmmmm! What a lovely thing to watch! 🙂
S gets a helping hand from R:
And my little J gets help from his nanny 😀
We have a tradition of getting each child something of his own to hang on the tree each year. Then when they are old enough to have homes of their own, they’ll have a “starter kit” of their very own decorations to hang on their own Christmas tree, gathered from their very first Christmas from the time they were born.
But there’s one item hanging on the tree that has my name on it: this one! (Gotta love my Starbucks coffee! 😀 )
So it’s a 16 year old tree, and it’s not 10 feet tall, but it’s been with us from the birth of our eldest son and we love it. 🙂
The View from the 41st
On my side of the world, the holiday season gives everyone the best excuse to party. It’s a wonderful time because you get to meet up with people you hardly see the rest of the year. Relatives from around the world fly back home to be with family. Office people turn into party animals in a 180º transformation that puts the pumpkin-coach metamorphosis in Cinderella to shame. 🙂
My hubby’s office party was held in the 41st floor of a hotel, and as always, I brought along my Nikon D90 with me. His office Christmas parties are always themed, and the different divisions come up with a program of sorts where they compete against each other to win the prize for the best presentation. ‘Course I’d never pass up the chance to take advantage of the photo-ops! 😀
A couple of photos of that evening:
The theme this year was Asia; this was the winning team’s presentation:
Awards were given for best costume of the night… these ladies were the nominees:
(I think Asian costumes are so exotic! 😀 )
So anyway, when the party was over, I looked out of the floor to ceiling windows down at the city below and decided the view would make a GREAT shot! DH saw me fiddling with my camera (no tripod in tow), and teased me: “There is no way you’re going to get a clear photo of the street from this distance without a tripod and with the complete lack of lights.”
Well. Have I said that deep down inside, I have this little rebellious streak that surfaces when one presents me with a challenge that sounds more like a dare? 😆 So of course, I took a photo of the street from above. Here it is:
Don’t you just love those Christmas trees made of lights? 🙂
Project 365?
Are you doing this? Project 365, as I understand it (correctly, I hope? 😛 ) involves taking a photo every single day of the year (hence the 365). This was started some years back–the first time I heard about it was on the photojojo blog, with photos being uploaded to flickr. As all good things go, the interest in this project spread, and now some of my Spraground sistas have decided to join this project (boy, do I envy their energy and their ability to do this! I so wish I could, except that I’m also absolutely sure that I’d fail by the first week!)
I love taking photos and I joke that my Nikon is surgically attached to my body, but I’m not sure about whether I’d be able to keep up taking a photo every single day. Now if it were a weekly thing…
So I’m wondering: am I the only one who isn’t brave enough to take on this challenge? 😆 All this wondering led me to more thinking: what other options are there for people like me, who may not be able to keep up with the daily photo-vitamin requirement?
If I am fearful of my ability to tackle a daily thing, what about a weekly thing instead? Documenting a few days a week for 52 weeks in the year… that’s 52 layouts… hmmm! Tempting! *eyebrows going up and down*
What if weekly is still too daunting? What about a monthly thing? Documenting the highlights of each month for 12 months in a year… that’s 12 layouts… certainly do-able! *eyebrows going up and down faster*
Heehee. So you know where all of this is leading to, right? What can I create to share with everyone who wants to play with their cameras, whether on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis?
Yep! Here it comes! A freebie, finally! (A small one, but one that comes with a lot of affection anyway!)
Here’s a photo tag which you can use to write down the date when the photo was taken and a few notes to record the special moment captured. I’ve included two versions of the tag: one flat and one curled.
Click on the image above to download. Thank you for the love you leave on my blog as you download 🙂
I’ll be back soon, but for now I need to jump into bed because the sun is about to rise!
Happy New Year (((((hugs))))) to you, my sweeties!
Yep. Lotsa buzz going on around here. Starting to feel like a real bee (not a queen, though… that’s wishful thinking. I’m more like the worker type or the drone 😆 )
BUT! It’s all good, right? There is always so much to be thankful for! And on that note, before I forget, Happy Thanksgiving to one and all! Hope you had an awesome time celebrating all that’s warm and wonderful in your life (and hope you had a great Black Friday shopping spree, too! 😀 )
We’ve got a lot to catch up on, so I hope you’ve got your shopping for the day done (at least for today 😛 ). So get comfy, sit back, grab that cold drink (or warm, if the snow outside is starting to freeze you), and put your feet up… and here we go!
The Gift that Lasts Forever
Have you gone Christmas shopping yet? You have? No fair… you can do mine. 🙂
I haven’t done any Christmas shopping, but that’s okay… there’s time to freak. Let’s see… I have exactly 19 days to go on a wild race to the stores. (And believe me, given the Christmas traffic in my part of the world, that’s not a lot of days to shop in. It’s not surprising to spend a quarter of each day sitting in traffic–and that’s if you’re lucky. *sigh* Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating. It’s just that I like traffic–any kind of traffic, any length of traffic–as much as I like … hmmm… bitter gourd. 😛 Each holiday season, I tell myself I’m going to shop the entire year next year, so that by December I would have no one left to shop for–you know, that dream of sitting contentedly, all gifts wrapped and ready to be delivered way before the 20th day of December–and of course, every year December rolls around and I wonder where that shop-early resolution got shelved during the past 11 months. What can I say? It’s an elusive dream. 😆 )
But hey, guess what? There’s a gift you can give which doesn’t require you to lock arms with the rest of the country as they run around the malls, looking at their lists and checking them twice. Better yet, this gift is truly special, the kind that doesn’t make you fat, that doesn’t collect dust on a shelf, that doesn’t get broken if dropped. This is the gift that lives on, long after the wrapper has been turned into recycled paper… (the season allows me to be cheesy, right?). It’s gift of learning, of discovery, of creating, of celebrating.
So yeah! Give the gift of digi-goodness to those you love this season! (Yes, that includes you! You can give yourself this gift too!)
There’s a huge, first-time-ever, crazy-generous gift over at our Spraground, and it’s called the Holiday Sale! Jessica has taken the best-selling digital courses and slapped on a huge discount on them, and there are even bundled offers (where you get a really, really great class 😉 for free if you take the bundle of 3 courses).
It’s so awesome that you can even divide the bundle gift between you and your friends! (You can give the entire bundle, lock stock and barrel, to your BFF 😀 or you can give one or two courses to your friend and keep the third and the free one for yourself. Oooor you can even give the four courses to yourself if you just joined us on our Spraground recently for our super-successful Stories In Hand free course and decided you like our Spraground enough to paint your name on a swing. 😉
The sale goes on till Christmas Day, so you can totally do your last-minute shopping on the web as well. You can send the gift either with a print-able card (we’ve got them on the Spraground–you just need to download them and type or write the coupon code before you give them to your loved ones), or you can send the gift via email. See? Isn’t Jes awesome? She thought of everything to make life in the fast-season lane easy for you! 🙂
(Alright, you may run to the Spraground and grab those courses now… I’ll wait right here for you to come back. >heehee< )
(Oh and PS. the image is click-able… it’ll take you right over to our Spraground! 😉 )
PAD makes a Comeback
Remember the photo-a-day we had last May, where we took a photo each day of the month, and at the end we have an entire day-by-day account of the extraordinary found in the ordinary days? We have that going on again over at our Spraground, upon the suggestion of one of my dearest friends, Lindsan. We’re taking a photo a day for each day of December (especially tricky, if you’re wrapped up in a million things to do this month, or especially exciting, if you’re one of the more organized people who’ve got their decor up and the gifts all wrapped and are just waiting for the 25th to roll around. If you’re the latter, I wanna be you. 😀 )
It’s only Day 4 and over at the special December 2008 Photo-A-Day gallery that Jes put up for all those who want to join (yes, that would be you, too, if you haven’t yet joined… COME!), there are soooo many wonderful photos and layouts coming up! I wish I had the time to leave love on all of them (yep, that’s on my to-do list too)… one of these days, I’m going to be successful at catching up with this! (There were 24 pages of photos/layouts last time I checked. )
If you want to take a photo a day and collect warm fuzzies from the awesome folks over at our Spraground but just found out about it now, come and join us anyway! (You can always post the previous days, a few days late! 🙂 )
And in case you’re thinking twice… there’s another special treat that Jes has cooked up to make our Photo-A-Day adventures more fun! Go read about it on her blog HERE.
And just to show you what a win-win situation we have here, at the end of December not only will you have had the chance to win a great prize, not only will you have experienced the special brand of Spraground warmth in our community, not only will you have had something exciting to do with your camera for every single day of an entire month, but–best of all–you’ll have 31 photos worth of wonderful memories, preserved forever either in photographs or in layouts!
How awesome is that?
Totally! Here now are my first four days of December PAD (with stories interspersed):
Day 1: Bread for Breakfast
A few weeks ago, some close friends of dh and mine invited us to a joint-birthday celebration at this little deli where they sell the yummiest and freshest French bread ever! Since then, I’ve filled our table with all the different types of French bread (and yes, with the cheese and the sausages to go with it! Mmmmm!)
Warm bread and Christmas warmth… it’s a perfect fit!
Day2: Igloo, Southeast-Asian Style
When I was a kid, I wanted to have my own playhouse. I had a nipa hut in our backyard, complete with ladder and windows that you kept open with sticks (authentic!), but I didn’t really like spending time in there because it was hot and it made me itchy (and between me and the teddy bear family I kept in it, there just wasn’t enough space). And to my little mind, it wasn’t cool. hehe. What was cool for me and my brother, 2 years older, was having our own treehouse. There was just one tiny problem: though our backyard was full of trees, they weren’t members of the treehouse-strong-branch family. The closest we ever got to making our treehouse back then was hanging a floral blanket over the branch of the aratilis* tree. It probably looked pathetic to the adults, but for us, it was treehouse-teepee heaven. 😀
(*aratilis – For those with green thumbs: I did a google search for aratilis, and found out that it belongs to the genus Muntingia, and is a close relative of the Jamaican cherry. It’s tinier than the first joint of your pinky finger; it’s green and hard when it isn’t ripe, and red and squishy when it’s ripe. Never enjoyed eating it, though my sister loved it. 😆 )
So… this yearning for a playhouse–is it genetic, you think? Is it something that all kids pass through? Because all my kids passed through a stage of trying to build their own playhouses (never mind that there are Little Tykes ready-built playhouses; there must be a primal urge to build a cave with one’s own hands).
My fifth son just built his a few days ago. Right in the comfort of our living room.
Yep. I knew those huge floor throw pillows had to be good for sumthin’. 😆
Day3: Oh Happy Day!
Oh happy day! Oh happy day! My package finally came in! My long-awaited Bind-It-All, accessories, space bar, acrylic and chipboard covers, and o-rings, finally in my home! Yabba-yabba-yeah-YEAH!
Okay, so maybe I kind of went overboard with all those o-rings… shhhhh. ( Wouldn’t you, if it took about a month for the supplies to get to you? 😆 Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m justifying it. heehee).
Of course, since I happen to be a gadget queen, it should come as no surprise that I totally love this tool?
A corner rounder that can cut through chipboard and other thick stuff! Mmmmm! It’s like a long-lost relative of my beloved Cropadile! 😆
Now, all I have to do is learn how to use these. Unlock the Power of the Tools! Indulge in the Gadget Love Affair! Let the hybrid games begin! bahahahaha!
Oh! Along with the BIA, I also got a bunch of books (to read during the Christmas break–yay!), ordered from both Amazon and ideabooks4u.
Love these two stores, amazon & ideabooks4u. The best part? Great customer service. I ran into a snag with Amazon (Ali’s book was listed as available, and then not), and they fixed it up as best as they could. Gotta love that. This was the first time I ordered from ideabooks4u (to get that Ali book which wasn’t available in Amazon), and they did an awesome job of delivering quickly and shipping the items wonderfully.
I am a sucker for great customer service. The product, whatever it is, has to be fabulous–of course, or else, why buy it, right? But even if I’ve got an excellent product staring me in my face, if it isn’t accompanied by excellent customer service, I can easily turn around and march right out, empty-handed and wallet-full, without an iota of regret.
Let me digress a bit and mention that (based on my experience) all digi shoppes are awesome and I have not yet met a designer who wasn’t a really, really nice, generous, sweet person. But I need to give a shout-out to my friend, Becky, who handles customer service at Scrapbook-Graphics.com. Each and every time I have run to her for help, whether it’s a tiny issue or a huge concern, she has always treated my pleas for help with much gentleness, concern, kindness, and immediate action. If there was an award given for excellent customer service in a digi shoppe, I’d vote for Becky any day. She’s definitely one of the reasons why SBG is among my favorite digi-shoppes! 🙂
I think it’s totally great to take an ordinary day and make it special by celebrating people who do their jobs with much heart and dedication. Just appreciating them is enough to put a smile of gratitude and quiet contentment on my face! (Among these people would be the three security guards who serve at my sons’ school. They are such a joy to meet every morning! Everyday when I take my kids to school, I’m greeted with big smiles and warm “Good morning!” greetings… every. single. day. Rain or shine. No fail. I love that, you know? That cheerfulness in the morning that lasts all the way till later on in the day when I come over to pick up my kids–it’s so precious! They’re definitely one of the best things I love about my sons’ school! 🙂 What about you–whom would you like to celebrate today? 😉
Day4: Belen on a Deadline
Ever tried crafting on a deadline?
Last Wednesday afternoon, my son R came home with news:
“Mom, my teacher wants me to submit a belen for extra credit.”
Belen is the Filipino term for the nativity scene, which can be found at Christmastime in every Filipino home (that, and the ubiquitous parol, or Christmas star). 😀
I noted the information and… promptly forgot about it, thinking there’d be the weekend to deal with it.
Well. Yesterday afternoon, R came home with news again: “The belen is due tomorrow.”
And: “It has to be artistic.”
Whaaaaa? You need this is less than 24 hours?
Zoom. Off we rushed to the malls to look for a nativity scene that could be bought off the shelves. Shouldn’t be a problem, right? After all, this is standard Christmas decor fare.
Wrong. Six stores and two pairs of tired legs after, I decided to buy a nativity scene figure and some raw materials and c.r.e.a.t.e. the nativity scene. I had absolutely no idea how it would come out; I only knew that it was our only option, since the bookstores we went to had absolutely no books with a nativity scene of the paper-doll kind; and none of the toy stores had any toy nativity scenes.
Here’s what the preliminary stages of the nativity-scene-creative process looked like:
The bare naked facts:
The backside:
(jumble of rice lights peeping on the right side)
The front:
And let’s not forget the recipe:
Ingredients:
extra thick chipboard, leftover unused chopsticks from Japanese-food takeout, some strapping tape, glue sticks, PVC glue, brown crepe paper, glittery fronds, a set of tiny rice lights, leftover animal toys borrowed from children’s toy box, and one store-bought Holy Family figure
Tools Needed:
glue gun, cutter, cutting mat, and yer good old trusty Cropadile 😉
Procedure:
Mix together, pulling cobwebby strands of glue from the glue gun (which manage to find their way all over the stuff). Cut some, measure some, laugh a lot. Plug in the lights when done, and voila!
The finished product, and my Day 4 Photo-a-Day accomplished as well! 😆
Freebie Mini
And since you made it this far, I thought it would be really nice if I could reward you with a little freebie, right?
This is just a tiny one… I have found that if I wait till I’ve got a fuller set to give away, I end up not blogging for days while working away on my designs. Then I end up torturing you with these long, long, looooong posts! 😆
So I decided to try a different route and give off little freebies now and then… that way I get to see you more often, and you get to download more (albeit smaller) freebies! Does that work for you? 🙂
So here’s what we have for today:
This is a 6×6 chipboard journaling block… just type (or write, if you’re doing hybrid 😉 ) your journaling on the lines, and voila!
Click on the image to download the journaling block (or should I say journaling circle?) 😀
PS. 4shared no longer allows comments on the download page unless you have an account with them and are logged in… so I would totally embrace you if you took the time to leave love on my blog as you download. 🙂
And before I go (it’s mid-dawn once again!), I have a little riddle for you:
Question: What could a 14-year-old teenage girl and her middle-aged aunt possibly have in common?
Answer: A love for Jason Mraz! Well… more specifically, absolute adoration for the boy by the teenage girl, and absolute love for the music (not the boy, LOL) by the aunt.
And because my niece is in Paris, this one is especially for her, in hopes that she manages to bump into the boy of her dreams while he walks along the streets again, someday in the future. 🙂
Enjoy, and I’ll see you soon, my sweeties!
PS. I can’t believe the guy just chased those pigeons down! Ooogy! I remember the first time I was in Paris, and dh wanted to take a photo with all the pigeons on the street… and I love birds. NOT. I think you can tell from my hunched up shoulders and the body-tilt (away from the birds, far far away) in the photo below. bwahahaha! 😆
There is no way to put into words what an immensely wonderful experience our recently-concluded Type+writer course has been. Funny how a writing course can leave one speechless… but that is exactly how I’ve been for a good part of the course. Speechless with awe and admiration and amazement at the incredible response from each one who took the Type+Writer ride with Jessica and me!
Every single Spragmate who took the course was incredibly terrific. Our class gallery is filled with precious layouts that tug at the heart, make you laugh, make you smile, make you weep. These are not just photos and words on pages, they’re hearts and souls laid bare on the pages. I am so honored to have been witness to this wonderful journey of heart and soul and photoshopping fingers!
I had the most awesome two weeks of my life working with my dear friend Jessica. Just when you think that she’s so awesome and that she can’t get any better than best, she just ups and surprises you by being even more awesome than the minute before! Gotta say, this lady is one of my most favorite people on earth! What a total gift it was to be able to work hand in hand with her on this course. This is certainly an experience that has carved itself on my heart forever.
To all my darling Spraggirls/Spragguys who’ve left love on the forum and in my inbox: Jessica and I love you guys. We really do. You are just incredibly awesome.
HUGE hugs and squeezes to each of you!
And for those who missed the Type+Writer beta course, stay tuned… I hear it might be coming back early next year! 😉
So now that the course is over (and happy me, I still have a couple of weeks to marvel at each and every layout in our gallery!), I am suffering from withdrawal symptoms… I’ve been getting too much sleep since last night! 😆
Triathlon Update
Just when I thought the Olympics had all but covered the momentum of our excitement, our triathlon photos finally came out in the newspapers last September 9th. Woohoo! Because of the limited space, we each got only one photo of ours published instead of the original bunch that we were told the newspaper originally planned to publish… but hey, who’s complainin’? 😀
Our triathlon photos, published! Woohoo!
And the first paragraph of the article was about us, too! Cool!
Triathlon Writeup
One of these days, I’ll probably resurrect my Flickr account and upload the triathlon photos I took… I think if I were a triathlete, I’d love to get my hands on any photographic evidence that my body is still a lean, mean machine, eh? 😆
(Can you tell I’ve got time on my hands? 😆 )
I Want
I’m a firm believer in the saying, When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. 😉 (Shopping also keeps me awake and on my toes and totally inspired, so don’t ask me how much digi schtuff I bought in the last couple of weeks… ‘course I’d use any excuse to buy those yummies, right? hehe)
Bad habits are hard to break, so since I’ve been awake with not much to do these past couple of days, I’ve been surfing… Tsk, tsk. This is dangerous stuff, surfing. You see things that you never thought you needed, and suddenly you find yourself chanting (softly at first, then increasing in volume in tempo): I want, I want, I want!
Here’s my latest “I want”:
I want you, Bind-it-all 2.0!
I’ve been resisting this for the longest time (and good thing, too, because they just came out with the 2.0 new improved version!). I have my beloved Cropadile, and I’ve been convincing myself that I really don’t need another gadget, since I can punch holes easily through most of the material (and more) that the Bind-It-All can… Sure, those wires are so cool, but surely there must be substitutes for those wires?
However. During one of our chats, I asked my dear friend and guru (and shoe-shopping enabler) Jes what the difference was between the Cropadile and the Bind-It-All (and yes, I kinda figured that the Cropadile is a glorified puncher and eyelet setter, but what a glory it has! 😆 ) and she gave me the link to Zutter’s vid that shows the BIA at work. I must confess I was a bit distracted by the vid (hehehe) but I did feel the rumble of a “want, want, want” chant beginning inside… And of course, it didn’t help in the dissuasion department that Jes herself has a BIA and says it works in the most awesome way!
So. This is the latest gadget(object) of my affection. The only annoying thing is that, since I need to have it shipped it over so many miles, I need to predict what supplies I’ll be needing so that it all comes in one big bulk. (Yum, don’t you love FedEx?).
Sooooo I need some advice from you sweeties. Tell me, do you have a Bind-It-All? Do you love it? Do you find that you buy less scrapbook albums off the shelf and instead spend time indulging in your creative manual labor with this delish machine and the accompanying wires and chipboard covers? And the million-dollar question: what O-wire rings do you use most often? (I can’t decide which ones to get!)
End my misery (by telling me) or enable me (by telling me)… either way, I’d love to hear from you! (And when you do drop me a line, I’d be most grateful for your assistance in turning this I want, I want, I want into I have, I have, I have !
More later…
I’m off to work on some more freebs for you sweeties, so I’ll see you later with more news! Till then, have a happy, scrappy day! 😀
Technorati Tags: digital scrapbooking,freebies,Type+Writer
This is where we’re at right now… in other words, this is what you’ll see in any given room at any time of the day if you walk through our home:
Wall-E & Friends
In fact, even other toys are transformed into Wall-E Wannabe’s: (Sound byte: “Mom, look! I made my own Wall-e!” )
Wall-E, Version 2
(That’s actually a toy that can be transformed into virtually anything, but its basic parts allow you to create dinosaurs and vehicles. Cool toys. We only had Lego when we were kids. hehe)
Work
I’ve been totally wrapped up in work on Type+Writer, our up-and-coming first-ever journaling and typography course on our Spraground! I’m extremely excited to be team-teaching the Type+writer course with the ever fabulous Jessica Sprague!
If you love making layouts but struggle with putting down the words to go with the photos, this course is for you! If you love writing, and journaling on layouts comes easy to you, this course is also for you! If you want to explore new techniques for getting those words onto your layouts with Photoshop’s awesome arsenal of tools, this course is for you! If you’ve taken any of Jessica’s online courses, you’d know that she is the absolute Best at everything she does, and you wouldn’t want to miss this latest course that she’s teaching! (Yep, in other words, you, you, and you… we’d love to have you in our course! 😀 )
So if you haven’t heard about it yet, read all about our Type+Writer course here! Registration will be on September 1st and our first day of class will be on September 8th! Jes and I promise that it’s going to be a fun-filled, very inspiring, creative two weeks that you’ll be spending with us when you decide to sign up for our course! So come, hop, skip, jump, run to the Spraground on September 1st and be counted among the beta Type+writers! 😀
Where Is He?
My sister left a comment asking me where the photo of Jun was on my blog… the one that he loved, the one that he said he’d use for all publications that request a photo of him. Well, sister dear, this is for you 😀 :
The Photography Master
The Photography Master, Take 2
Wow, It’s About Time!
I’ve been wanting to release a freebie for the longest time… I took a break (a mental breather) and found some time to design a little paper pack for all you sweeties!
These aren’t the usual kind of papers that I normally make, but it’s always nice to push the envelope and explore horizons, right? (To my friend, Veevs, if you’re reading this, I hope I’m not too far off the mark when I say that I think these would be the kind of papers you might want to use! 😆 )
So here is a mini paper pack for all of you: highly saturated and textured, for all those layouts that need an extra punch!
LivEdesigns Wild Grafix Paper Pack
Click on the image to download.
Thank you so much for the love you leave on my blog as you download! I totally love reading your comments! 🙂
Well, that’s all for now, folks! It’s back to the saltmines for me! 😆
Well, hello there! Man, have I missed sitting here with you on this blog porch, just swinging leisurely and sipping contentedly on iced tea, watching the birds hop on the steps and listening to the faint tick tock of the clock…
The past weeks have been more like roaring waves of the ocean rushing forward and falling on top of each other with one deafening crash after another. Major WORK stuff, in other words.
There still major work stuff to be done, to be sure, but I’m giving myself a break before diving into the salt mines once again. After all, I just finished the article (and met the deadline, woohoo!!!) that I was asked to write for the August issue of DigishopTalk’s newsletter. My friend and fellow Spragsistah Kelleigh is the new editor-in-chief, and she asked me to do an article on Recording Firsts. I think it turned out way longer than it should’ve (lol… not that that’s surprising now, is it? bwahahaha). But, as is the case with all writing projects I delve into, I find myself totally caught up in the moment and am practically oblivious to the outside world, till I’m done with the writing and can come out of my cave like a bear stretching after months of hibernation. Aaaaaaaah. It’s a lovely feeling.
So… let’s play catch up. So much has happened since I entered the mouth of that cave. 😆
May Photo A Day Album – Done!
Woohoo!!! I actually got my May Photo A Day album all done and printed out and placed nicely in the pages of my 8×8 album! (Don’t you just love the sense of accomplishment that comes from seeing your layouts actually printed out and resting in those page protectors? I love it!)
Here’s what my album looks like:
the happy 8x8 album!
the title page
Day 1 and Day 2 pages
Day 3 and Day 4 pages
Day 9 and Day 10 pages
Day 15 and Day 16
I used my Extraordinary Days Album templates, along with Meredith Fenwicks lovely luscious papers from her Day Dreams Collection Wildest and Afternoon Serenade kits. The staple is from Meredith’s Everyday Inspiration collection and the overlay is from Kim Christensen. I was amazed at how fast putting this album came together… I was able to do all the 31 layouts *and* print them out, cut them, and insert them into the album page protectors within 24 hours! Gotta love templates, huh? (PS. If you want to snag the templates, just scroll down to the earlier posts and I have the links over there! )
First-Ever On-the-Spot Photo Shoot!
On the first weekend of August, a group of us, led by the country’s top pro photographer (and my very dear brother-in-law) Jun de Leon, went to the mountains to take part in a special project put together by Jun. The assignment: Take photos for an entire day to document the first-ever ITC-approved-triathlon-to-be-held-in-Asia (phew! how else do I explain that! ), and it was held in the Philippines! How lucky could we get!
Jun gathered a group of us and gave us specific assignments. We were to take only the photos assigned to us so that we could come up collectively with an extensive coverage of the triathlon from all angles. I found out about this only a couple of weeks before D-day, when we attended the wedding of one of our friends.
Intermission: it was a lovely wedding, where we were requested to come all in black (so that only the bride would be in white).
Here are some of the foolish shots of us: I only put them here because I promised my Spraground friends that I’d show them the one and most probably the only time this year that I would be wearing a dress.
So anyway, back to the triathlon event. There were 7 of us in the group, which now has been dubbed by Jun as The Crew. (I provide the only estrogen on the team as I’m surrounded by men all around! The best thing about it? My hubby is part of The Crew, which means we get to enjoy our photography addiction and play together! Love that!)
The triathlon event was held on just one day, from 6AM to 6PM. There were two events, the regular triathlon, and the 03, which is basically the same as the regular triathlon but with the distance multiplied by three.
The evening before the event, we met with Leo, one of the best Philippine documentary photographers, who gave us a little seminar on documentary photography. My assignment was to take the Emotions photographs, but the person who was assigned to take the Details photographs didn’t show up, so Jun gave me the Details assignment as well (much to my delight! heehee).
After the seminar and dinner, we went to the event area to conduct an occular inspection of the site and to plan out how and where we would position ourselves the next day. Since we got back to our hotels at almost 11pm and we knew that the athletes would start coming tp the venue at 5am the next day, I decided to forego sleep (terrorized by the prospect of not waking up on time and missing the entire kickoff!)
It was also raining crazily, and so DH and I spent a good part of the night fitting raincoats over our cameras and lenses and trying to figure out a way to maneuver our lenses with the blasted raincoats on them. (Not easy!)
Good thing our kids were with us, because I had fallen asleep at 3AM and woke up only at 5AM when my 4-year-old S asked for his “milky.” I woke up DH and we practically ran out of the hotel to get to the kickoff point of the triathlon (our kids were left with their nannies and our older son).
It was dark and dreary, and the rain just kept pouring down, and after a while you forget about the rain-repellent hoodie you’re wearing and you think “oh heck, so let’s all have rainwashed hair, why don’t we?” The sun never shone that day, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise since the lighting was awesome (no direct sunlight and glare to deal with), and the cool winds meant that the athletes didn’t get wiped out with heat and fatigue too easily, which in turn meant that they didn’t take forever to complete the course.
So there we were, 7 of us, with our cameras and our lenses. I called us the Guerillas, since that’s what I felt we were… charging on ahead, taking the photos from whatever angle and position we could, and because we had media permits, we were able to get to places that the rest of the public couldn’t get access to (since they had closed off areas for the triathlon event alone).
The hardest part of it all? Going straight from 5AM to 6PM without a drop of coffee, no breakfast, no lunch, no snacks except a single banana and a power drink that tasted a lot like my kids’ vitamins. Yuck. The best part of it all? The Crew, the collective energy we had, the adventure of shooting on the spot, playing with our cameras, cheering on the athletes, and taking on this photographic project with DH! Would I do it all over again? You BET!
We had to submit our photos to Jun a week after so that he could choose from them and submit them to one of the two biggest national dailies for publication.
I used my Nikon D80 and my 18-200mm lens. I had my 17-55mm and 85mm lenses as well, but after briefly using them, decided I wanted the flexibility and zoom ability of my 18-200, so I kept that on the entire day. DH used his 200-400mm, and oh boy, does that bazooka lens rock!!! — but hubby rocks more, hehe!
Here are the photos that Jun chose from my collection:
And here’s a glimpse of The Crew at work (and at play):
Ooooh!!! The sun is coming up! More tomorrow! For now I have to jump into bed! See you with more catching up tomorrow, my sweeties!
I have been working on a class that my dear friend Jessica and I will be teaching on our Spraground come September! (What an honor to be teaching with the digi-godess herself!) It’s called Type+writer, and it’s going to be a class on journaling and typography (Read all about it on the Spraground!)
A few weeks ago, I was browsing through the bookstore and picked up this book:
I wish I could say I bought it knowing that I would definitely find something in it that would inspire me for the upcoming course that I would be team-teaching with Jessica, but the truth is, it just called out to me from the bookshelf, and I am all weak-kneed and soft when it comes to resolve in bookstores. (Can never go in and come out without something in my hands).
When we digiscrap and when we edit our photos, we always talk about workflow. You know, what process do you normally go through when you scrap a layout? When you edit your photos? Well… ever thought about your workflow in a bookstore? 😆 I’d love to know!
Here’s how I go from the shelf to the counter in bookstores.
I naturally seek out the areas that interest me. That would be… uh… probably everything. LOL. I can go from cookbooks (even if I don’t cook–there are great photos in there, and besides, hope springs eternal! 😛 ) to interior design (love looking at house designs and room designs–you never know when you’re going to want to redesign your room or your kids’ rooms, right?) to the business books (for some smart reading) to the children’s books (oooh! lots of deliciousness there, and often deep wisdom disguised in very simple phrases too!) to graphic design/photography/photoshop books and writing/writers’ books and general interest books (these last three are where I spend the largest chunk of time browsing and turning pages).
I used to read fiction once upon a time, I’m sure. In fact, it’s all I read from the time I was a kid up to when I was in college. I don’t know when the shift occured, but lately I’ve had no interest in most fiction books (think I got more than my quota early on? 😀 ) and so it’s the nonfiction ones that have me totally absorbed.
But I digress.
We were talking workflow, right? 😀 As I go to these areas of the bookstore, I pick up a book, my attention called initially by the book’s title and subtitle. First thing I do is turn it over and read the blurb at the back. If the blurb fails to catch me, back to the shelf the book goes and I’m off to get my interest hooked elsewhere. But if the blurb passes my initial test, then I open it to the first page and read the first couple of lines. If I fall in love at that point, the book never makes it out of my hands… it glues itself to my hand and walks up to the counter with me, where the salesclerk goes ding-ding-ding, and a few minutes later I’m a happy woman taking home a new paperback or hardbound friend.
Funny how those first few lines matter. Even funnier, I’ve secretly caught my kids applying the same litmus test to the books they buy (Flip to first page, read first lines, good? Good! Sold!) 😀
So anyway, back to Nancy Peacock’s book. Normally, my cousin (who is a published poet in the US and my childhood constant companion and co-book-lover) will send me her latest recommendations about the best writing books and when this happens, I know exactly what to look for on my trips to the bookstore. But this time, last week, I went on a nice, not-looking-for-anything-specific kind of book shopping spree, and this is what I ended up taking home.
I love it. I don’t get much time in a day to read, what with my never-ending and ever-growing list of to-do’s that are screaming for attention, but once in a while you sit down with a book, and it’s just like having a cup of coffee with a new friend whom you’ve just discovered is such a warm, easygoing, interesting, funny person to be with, and you talk and talk and talk, and the one cup of coffee turns to three while the sun sets in the horizon…
Well, this book was that kind of friend to me. 🙂
And wow, guess what? It has inspired me further with my work on the Type+writer course! How much better does it get, huh?
PS. I discovered with no small amount of joy that the author’s favorite books as a child were the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. That immediately made her my virtual best friend. 😆 Nothing like finding out the books you loved as a child are regarded with as much holy affection by someone else heretofore unknown to you! I always think that’s an awesome thing! (Yeah, I have cheap thrills, hehe) 🙂
So… if you’re in a bookstore, and you like reading a book that absolutely sounds like your best friend telling you stories about her job of cleaning houses while she effortlessly blends in her views about writing which happens to be her other job when she’s not housecleaning, then pick up this book. Not many books compel me to read till the last page without putting it down, but this one has. And it’s not even something that contains incredibly profound, earth-changing truths… it’s just such a joy to read.
Cover Page Done!
Speaking of having tons of stuff to do… I haven’t made a layout in soooo long, I was getting withdrawal symptoms! Not for lack of desire, no… just a total lack of 24 more hours in each day!
But! I finally finished the cover page of my May Photo A Day Album! Whoopeedoo!
Meredith Fenwick – The Day Dreams Collection – Wildest Papers_Paper1
Katie Pertiet – Black Black Paper Pack_Paper1
Kim Christensen – Spelling101-BlackInkedOverlay, RedStampedOverlay
Photos by LivE
Oh! By the way, if you downloaded my multiphoto cover page template, don’t forget to save often because there are 31 photo masks in there, and when you pull in your photos, you don’t want to lose the file in case Photoshop struggles with its memory requirements! 😉 (Or merge the photo layer to the mask layer to save memory, if you’re absolutely sure you’re not going to change it later on). I’m just sayin’… 😀
PS. I kept my photos in their original size and let some details of each photo peep out of the squares, just to add interest to the cover page. I love the idea of guessing what each photo is like, and having to get to the inside pages to find out what each one was, and then maybe flipping back to the cover page to match the full photo with the photo part that shows on the cover. Hee!
Maybe it’s related to my love for the World-National Geographic Magazine for Kids, which I had a subscription for back when I was about 8 years old. I loved flipping over to the back cover (what is it with my fascination for back covers? hahaha!) where there were always about 9 detail photos… and the reader had to guess what they actually were (answers were on the inside part of the front page, upside down… bet it was their way of making sure we didn’t cheat by reading them first before we got to the back detail photos! heehee).
And now, with the cover all done and those detail photos peeping out, I’m all excited to work on the inside pages!
Freebie Promised, Freebie Delivered!
And speaking of inside pages… I finally got these ExtraordinaryDays Album inside page single-photo templates zipped, loaded, and ready for sharing!
And just because I love ya, I decided to include separate png files of the swirl and circle cluster accents that I used on the psd files… just in case you want to use them on your other layouts as well! 😉 Note that glass accents are the most difficult to add drop shadows to, because … uh… because glass behaves in a funny way, right? (Try putting a glass of something in the sun and you’ll see what I mean 😀 ).
So, because I really believe in keeping things as simple as possible, I decided to give you the glass accents with drop shadows applied already to them. If you wish to apply your own shadows further, you can… but note that this will make the black glass take on a darker, less transparent shade (and if that’s the look you’re going for, then it’s all good! 😀 )
So here’s what I’m sharing with you today!
LivEdesigns ExtraordinaryDays Album Inside Page Templates & Accents
THANK YOU SO MUCH for the love you leave on my blog! (I love the fuzzies you leave on my 4shared account, but the love you leave on my blog will last forever, whereas the fuzzies on 4shared disappear once I unload the files )
Don’t forget to link me up when you create with these as I’d really love to see what you create! 🙂
And… that’s all for now, folks! Have a happy day, my sweeties!
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), and it was held in the Philippines! How lucky could we get!
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liv.e simply 