Life's Whirlwind Adventures

So since taking a picture of the sun would have been cliche, I decided to find the next best thing.  A light bulb, no joking, but I did find some great plants that had some great sunlight shining on them, so those were my submissions for Week 20!! Also Lil Man playing at Sylvan Lake and the treacherous stairs that inflamed my sciatic nerve.

For the 19th week of this photo challenge we had to find the drama.  I personally like to keep my life fairly drama free so I wasn't sure where I would find drama, at least, not what I would classify as drama. We had a family type reunion, and well family always brings about some drama so here are some pictures of our family trip to the Calgary zoo to see the penguins and other animals. this picture had the most drama because lil man's cousin wanted nothing to do with the picture taking

Week 18 was perspective.  There was talk about us all trying to take a picture of the same subject, but as we all live in different areas of the province this was not really possible.  But I found some interesting subjects to choose for this week. One was  a picture of my sister on her wedding day, she looked so pretty, and I love the silhouette picture I was able to capture. The other was of a sign I had seen in one of the bars in Carlos and Charlies.  It was so fun and had everything to do with perspective, not even how I saw things, but how others see and value things.

The theme for week 17 was good. After some bad weeks, it was hard to pick what I was going to decide to use for week 17, but I came up with a couple. Spring was finally in the air and the blossoms on the flowers were beautiful, I was very happy to be welcoming back spring after a very long, long winter. Also another good thing was getting my NEW CAR (read in Bob Barker voice). I am totally enthralled with my new car and even though it was a pain that my Explorer was written off, I am very happy with how things turned out.

Here are my pictures for the Low Light theme.  I took them while I was in Mexico. I hope you enjoy them as well!! Cuernavaca at Sunset Tetela Volcano, you can see the smoke coming from the top

The old cliche is that a picture is worth a thousand words, right well, that was our challenge this week, to take a picture that had a story attached to it, but to not tell the story. So here we are my story picture

So all of my good friends will know this, I’m a bit of a clutter bug.  I had a cluttered desk in school, that turned into a cluttered locker, that was always a cluttered bedroom and now a cluttered house.  Not dirty, just cluttered. I have a lot of stuff and have problems ridding myself of my clutter. For example, I have 30 VHS tapes and NO VCR, but do I get rid of them??  No why would I do that, that would mean parting with shows that Chandler watched as a toddler, it’s dumb and sentimental and if I lost those VHS’s in a fire I wouldn’t replace them, I would just let them expire, but actually packing them up and taking them out of my house, well that’s another matter.  So I took a picture of my least cluttered area, because the rest are a little absurd.  Enjoy!!!

I am a bit of an early riser, always have been and always will be.  So when the My World theme came up I knew I had to get a very specific picture.  When I drive to work at sunrise in late winter early spring, the lighting and view at the river bank is truly spectacular.  So I knew I needed to get a picture of that, because I love that about my world! When the sun rises and I get to explore another day, it’s just fantastic.  I know that sounds a little cheesy, but I am very happy with the outcome of the picture I captured, what do you guys think?

Just east and north of down town Red Deer you will find Kerry Wood Nature Center and just south of that is my office.  Week Twelve’s theme was black and white.  Everywhere I looked there was white, white and more white, but do you think  could find black, not so much. However, I love editing, and changing photos to black and white is probably one of the easiest edits to do, at least now.  While I was training a new supervisor I noticed movement outside my office window. Now as cars drive by my office window to park at the school or for our office, this isn’t unusually, but this movement was loping.  So I did a double take and saw a huge moose outside.  In the middle of the city there was a 6 and ½ foot moose!!              This is actually less unusually then one might think since Red Deer is very much a parks city and the river is a natural travel route for many animals, but ...

Initially I took a by on this week.  It was cold, and not at all warm, and I couldn’t get my creative juices flowing.  But then I came across this photo I took with my iphone and thought it fit the criteria of being warm.  I had used the “wood Camera” app to edit the photo to make it a sepia finish and as the day was actually pretty warm, with the Sepia finish it did feel warm and it was a great day.

Interesting Light was my focus this week, and it was hard to find something that would fit the theme and not be something the I had already photographed.  For my birthday, my best friend Estelle came up to Edmonton, for the Brier.    Estelle invited Adrian and I up and we all went to a curling game then went drinking at the Patch!! It was a great night you can read more about it in the Brier blog I wrote previously, but here are the pictures I used for this week!!

New Toy or just a box New was the theme for week 9.  Interestingly enough, not much new was going on in my life during this week. Nothing I could claim was new, my life is generally pretty even keeled and things don’t change that much for me, so I posted the only new thing that happened, my kids got new hair cuts.  Best news about this was that Chan lost his Beiber hairstyle and “flow” and got a real haircut, sorta like his Uncle.

Week 8 was my view.  During the week my only views were work, my kids and the open road on a drive to Provost.  This isn’t a complaint or anything, I mean really my kids are awesome to look at and driving on the open road every once in awhile is nice change. Since the weather was good it was a great drive, and I was able to get some great pictures!!

So things in my life have been a little tumultuous for the last little bit. Work's been hectic, my personal life has been in some yo yo rollercoaster and my ambition has been, to say the least, in the toilet. I have been taking pictures for my 52 week challenge, but getting them from my camera to the computer has been a hit or miss type activity.  I am still enjoying doing all these things that I was blogging about but I've not felt the urge to blog, and when I have felt the urge to blog, an overwhelming feeling of exhaustion would overtake me and I would say,  "I'll just do it later."  Then later would come and well here we are almost two months of silence on my blog, I want to kick myself because I was doing so well, and then all of a sudden a brick wall. The feeling of exhaustion reached to all parts of my life.  There were projects I wanted to get working on at work, but for awhile the thought of beginning any of those projects was just daunting so I put t...

So week seven was a free week, and I couldn't even get anything photographed that I was happy with so I waited until my family day trip and I submitted some of those photos.  Here are my favourites from that day!!! It was a fun day, the only thing that would have made it better would have been having Chan home with us!!!

Ok I am behind in my blogging a bit, so I need to catch you up.  We are actually into week eight as I post this blog.  But week six was Fearless.  Come up with good photos to encapsulate a theme can be difficult, and sometimes you do need a preamble to why the photo represents the theme.  So I will tell you a story. Many years ago, I became afraid to leave my, then, boyfriend.  We weren't good for each other, we were constantly fighting and I was miserable.  But he offered me a sense of security that I wasn't ready to let go.  I was competent, I was putting myself through school, I was putting food on the table, I was taking care of my little guy and I was doing it all without his help.  But I had painted him in my mind as vindictive, I  firmly believed that if we broke up he would take all the furniture from my house that was his, the kitchen table, the television, the couch and I would be left with very little and that because I would hav...

busy going to birthday parties Busy!! That is a great word to just describe my life, but to try to capture that in photo, well I am not sure how to go about doing that, what you usually get is the aftermath of busy, the crash and sleep of what we do after we have been go, go, go, all week long. Busy working multiple jobs So here are some of the photos that depict busy for me.  Let me know what you think!!! Busy teaching at work     Can you tell these two are related??? Busy Parking lot

The theme for the fourth week was HARSH! It could be interpreted for harsh mid day light or maybe harsh shadows.  I knew what I wanted to capture the second this was posted, but when I went out to get it it just didn't turn out that way.  And try though I did I thought I was going to miss the deadline for this week.  But I was able to pull it together and miracles of miracles I captured some Harsh lighting photos. My initial idea was to take a photo with the sun in the background but use the suns light to create a lighting halo backdrop. I have done it before, purely by chance and apparently there was no way I was doing it through practice. I must have deleted 50 photos, that just didn't capture anything. So I ventured outside and began taking some photos, these are the photos I initially took and hoped one of them would be good enough for my submission, not that anyone is judging them, but I am trying to learn here so I am my own worst judge. The second pictur...

So week three came and I thought I might have to give up, I mean I had ideas but well I couldn't find a way to photograph those ideas safely.  But I am getting ahead of myself so let me start at the beginning. Week three's theme was Find the Beauty. Which essentially meant take something ugly and use light and make it look beautiful.  So I began to think of things that are ugly, in my mind and opinion only, and well graffiti came to mind, as well as snow, garbage, clutter, but I really wanted to get some photos of some graffiti. Now on my drive to work I pass by this area by the river where the runoff from the streets is put into the river, you know where the street water ends up going down the drain and draining too.  I am at a total loss for what that is truly called but I think you understand.  Anyways, in the summer when we go rafting on river we always go by this spot and my hubby and his buddy call it shit rocks, because in the summer it's covered in graff...