And So It Begins

This morning, the “fambily” (our version of the word which includes myself, my husband Dave, our 6–year-old, and our 1-year-old) went out for a walk around our neighbourhood. As we’re walking, my eldest notices a lilac blossom on the ground and joyfully gives it to me. Aww. Being too small to tuck behind my ear (it was a single tiny flower after all), I gently hold it between my lips and snap a photo for posterity. (For those of you that don’t know me, the whole snapping-a-photo-for-posterity thing is like oxygen to me).

We get home. We eat lunch. We go our separate ways – which consists of soccer, the kiddie pool, and nap-land for the boys. And then there’s me. Wanting to get going on my blogging/creating. Thinking about the flower in my mouth photo. Trying to figure out how to translate it into a visual that my sister (whose photos I adore) would love. It needs to be something simplistic. Something with few, but bold, colours. Something that makes me feel pretty.

So I head outside once more and pluck a pink daisy from the garden (exactly like the one on the theme I’m currently working with, I might add) and I start playing. Different angles, different cropping, different amounts of direct and indirect light, even different facial expressions. I love my little “spy cam” (a  Nikon Coolpix S10 that I picked up after my friend Erin praised it so). It makes the arduous task of taking self-portraits easy and almost fun.

Once I download the photos, it becomes clear that the majority are heading to the recycle bin (oh, how I loathe the majority of photos of myself), but a few are salvageable. And with the help of Microsoft Picture It! Premium 10 to adjust saturation levels, brightness, and contrast, I whittle down the original image to this.

And it makes me smile. Whew. That wasn’t so hard, now, was it?