as I wanted to enter a photo this week over at i heart faces.

This is the photo I ended up submitting for the challenge – mainly because I adore the light and the fab red flare! Check out my entry over at my Challenges Blog.

The following are photos of him that I loved for one reason or another. Most because this shoot only took 10 minutes and I managed to capture that beautiful golden late afternoon light. Warms me up on a winter’s day!

The shot above was the other that I was considering to enter into the challenge. What do you think?

I call this one ‘Golden Boy’

Love the colours and textures in this and I love the way he is looking at the viewer.

so the saying goes.

I found that this blog has been devoted way too much to i heart faces challenges and have decided to reclaim it for myself!

Don’t worry, I will still be entering challenges but will be posting the entries from my old blog over at blogspot.

That blog is called k8tography – the Challenges please come over and visit.

I have also decided to do a personal Project 365 Challenge. This is to take one photo a day for 365 days. These daily shots are also hosted over at the Challenges site.

Cheers

Kate

The challenge over at my favourite photo blog this week is

Let’s celebrate families this week!

It doesn’t matter to us at all if your photo represents a “traditional” family or a “non-traditional” family. We are looking for photos that show off a cool way to capture a family together…be fun, creative, unique and enter the most awesome photo you can! We would also like each photo entry to have at least one (1) adult in it and even possibly a wide variety of ages represented.

Well, I looked through my photos but really wanted something that captured a special person in our children’s lives. Her name is Joycey. She is not ‘blood’ family but really she is our family. She lives two houses away from us and she has known our children all of their lives. Let me take you back….

We first met Joyce when we moved into our house in 1989. She has been there for us in the good times and the bad times. She has known our 3 kids since birth and looked after them on many occasions. She is the first person I call when there is a crisis. From when I was having a miscarriage to when my father died unexpectedly. She helps when she can and we help her. Her husband died before we met her and so when she needs a dead possum removed or something fixed, she calls on us. We see her just about every day. She has five adult children of her own who have their own children. Even some of her grandchildren have children which makes her not only a great Grandmother but a Great Grandmother.

Joyce turns EIGHTY years old on the 27th of February.

One of the many amazing things about Joyce is that she is so active. She is a gifted musician although she can’t read a note. She plays by ear and all you have to do is start humming a song and she can pick it up. She plays the Piano Accordian (squeezebox), she plays the piano, she plays the mouth organ. Her latest laugh is that now she plays So What? by P!NK on the piano.

She has been taken by each of our children to school on many occasions as ‘show and tell’.  She volunteers at nursing homes and plays the piano and/or piano accordian for all of the ‘old’ people – many of whom are younger than her. She is fun and thinks she is hip.

When she goes on an outing lets say on a boat – she will dress in a nautical theme. If she goes on a train trip she dresses in a train theme. (note: this CAN be embarrassing!)

On St. Patricks Day, she comes to our house dressed in a red wig, a green top hat and shamrock shaped sunglasses. Every birthday we have, she phones us at 7am in the morning with the ‘birthday’ song. We have to listen. She makes us wear the ‘birthday hat’ which is a hat that is shaped like a birthday cake with candles on it. She has a large collection of outrageous wigs. She laughs a lot. She makes us laugh.

She often takes our kids, now aged 15, 14 and 11 out. Every school holidays she takes them for what she calls ‘muckin’ rubbish day’. This means that she takes them to a kids movie (her excuse to see something cute and fun – today it was the Fabulous Mr Fox), she buys them junk food. Choc-top icecreams, popcorn – whatever they want. They see the movie and then go to Intencity where she plays the Pinball Machines. Then they go for more ice cream at the ice cream parlour…

She has been around our family for EVER. She is our family and here is a photo I took of her today with our three kids. I don’t know who is more of a kid though. She does not stop laughing. I made her lie on the ground and she thought that was just silly but she did it anyway.

Because. She. Loves Us.

Joycey and the kids

Please head on over to i heart faces and check out the wonderful family photos!

This is a very special challenge over at i heart faces. It is in celebration of their birthday! Happy Birthday to you guys – you have helped make my 2009 fun and challenging!

This challenge, we allowed are FIVE entries! Yay. Each photo MUST have the i heart faces logo in it. This was so much fun! Here are my entries….

1.

Showing the Aussie spirit by using QANTAS and flying the i heart faces flag!

2.

Super Cool Clark Kent Glasses with fab logo as modelled by Joyce

3.

Tattooed Bee

4.

i heart faces clubhouse?

5.

Super Cool Balloons for super fun people!

Please head on over to i heart faces to see the many wonderfully creative entries. They are mind blowing!

“I am submitting this photo into the I Heart Faces logo photo contest. By entering, I am granting I Heart Faces LLC permission to consider my photo for use in the marketing and promotion of their website.”

It’s pets week over at I Heart Faces so today, I decided to take some more photos of our 4 month old kitten, Mikki.

If you read my blog, you will know that at the end of August, we found a mother cat and her 7 one week old kittens. We bought them home and helped her look after them.

After having them for 6 weeks, we decided to keep one (how could we NOT?) and added Mikki to our family. We have another lovely looking cat called Jasper.  Notice I said lovely looking. He is. He is truly handsome. He is a stunning Silver Tabby. However, he is not nice. He doesn’t like us much (but he does stay around). So, we have given cat ownership another go, and by all accounts, so far Mikki is not only gorgeous to look at – he loves US!

I am thrilled to report that all other kittens and mother cat, Sunday, were found homes.

Here is Mikki, in Bronte’s arms in the very late afternoon sun. I love the glow.

Don’t forget to pop on over to i heart faces to see all the other amazing animals!

Well, I don’t have a photo of a super gorgeous baby sleeping…my lot are way too old for that! I do  have plenty of photos of them asleep though and all are super cute of course BUT I couldn’t resist entering this one….for something a little different!

Sleeping Kittens

There is almost nothing sweeter than cute little kittens. We found a mother cat back in August along with 7, one week old kittens. This photo was taken oh probably a week after we found them. The ginger kitten you see is ‘Ringo’ and I adore how he is sleeping with his little mouth open and his eyes too! We ended up keeping the kitten behind him and thankfully found the other 6 good homes.

Anyway, don’t forget to take a look at the many gorgeous sleeping babies and people over at I Heart Faces

Ahhhh sunflare. My one true photographic love. When I saw this weeks challenge I just KNEW that I had to enter. I immediately thought of this photo of my eldest boy child, Samuel. He is 15 and not my normal victim (that would be my 14year old boy child, Zachary) so it is nice that this one let me take photos AND he enjoyed it.

I have quite a few from this ‘shoot’ to choose from but I think this is my favourite. You can see his gorgeous eye(s) and I love the way the light acts as a halo around him but most of all I love HIM. He is a nice person. A little weird (I wonder where he gets THAT from!!!) but oh so nice.

Oh. Can you spot the heart shaped sunflare on his face! I just spotted it now!! Yay me! lol (of course I meant it!!!!!)

So, this is my entry for the Sun Flare challenge this week over at I Heart Faces please go and take a look at all the gorgeous flare from around the world…it is divine!

I Heart Faces – I love that blog site!

This week the theme is BLUE. I wasn’t going to enter (see previous blog entry) but then I had an idea this afternoon. Grabbed the willing victim middle child again and we went out to our front yard. I tell you, this boy is a dream to photograph. A dream!

In our front yard we have a treehouse (that rarely got used because “there might be spiders in there mum”). The treehouse has lovely yellow fibreglass slide that takes them down to earth again.

Near that is the cubby house painted like a Brighton Beach box, in front of that an old abandoned tyre swing and Zed boys bedroom which, is in fact an old white and blue caravan from the 1960′s. (Cheaper than a big reno and way cool!)

This photo was taken with Zed sitting on the blue step of his van. He is pretending to play his cool blue guitar. I say pretending because the only thing he can play is, of course, “Smoke on the water”. He gave up lessons. Such a shame.

Check out my other shots I took today of him in the post below….I am thrilled with this set.

Anyway, enjoy and please don’t forget to go and see loads of fab blue shots over at I Heart Faces!

Zed Boy playing his blue guitar!

Partly due to the fact that this blog kept going over its bandwidth allowance as I was getting way too many visitors! I do adore my visitors  and am getting my tech savvy boy, Samuel to organise my upgrade to the next level. This is the reason that I haven’t been entering into competitions or uploading any updates on what I have been up to!

I HAVE been taking tonnes of photos. Really enjoying myself at the moment. I was the ‘official’ photographer for Bronte’s school’s First Communion. Now THAT was a step learning curve that I quite enjoyed.

I decided to enter into this weeks I HEART FACES photography competition today (submissions close tomorrow) as I had a cool idea for a shoot. I grabbed my ever willing Zed boy and you will find my submission in the post above this.

However, here is a shot that I too that I ab-so-lute-ly ADORE. Am I just looking at this through mum goggles (or as the Americans quaintly say ‘mommy goggles’?) Please let me know what you think?

Here are two versions…

Zed boy - My favourite of today's shoot!

This one, I processed in Adobe Lightroom and used a vintage preset. Didn’t need anything done to it at all!

Same photo but processed using Eye Candy Actions - HoneyChild

I do love both but the Vintage Light Room one just does something special for me!

Here are more photos I took from the shoot today. All using Sheye Rosemeyer’s Eye Candy actions!

Zed and his guitar - Honey Child Action - in camera crop

Zed....

Zed - Honey Child Action, in camera crop

I quite like this crop as well....

I really enjoyed ‘fixing’ this photo – although, if I took this I would have been pretty darn happy! To tell you the truth, the only thing I would have had to change was the brightness…the rest was just pure fun!

Here is the orginal photo…

Original Photo

I use Photoshop CS3 and actions from the Divine Sheye Rosemeyer and also from Totally Rad. This is the first time I have played with CS3′s lens flare filter as I am a super sucker for lens flare. While I think it worked ok (I used it in the last Fix), I do love my all-natural camera lens flare…

I have tried to explain what I did for each fix. Sorry there are sooo many but I think you all know by now that I do love to play with actions etc!

Fix-It Number One

Fix-It #1

1. Adjusted Brightness using Curves

2. Cropped left side of photo

3. Lowered saturation using saturation slider in hue/saturation to -22

4. Ran action from Totally Rad called Luxe (hard), tweaked that action

5. Ran action from Totally Rad called Select-O-Pop.

6. Selected pen tool on layer mask of Select-O-Pop, used white brush at 20% opacity and brightened eyes

7. Ran action from Totally Rad called Luxe (soft), tweaked that action

8. Ran action from Eye Candy called Rounded Corners – medium

9. Saved as a .png file to preserve rounded corners transparency

Fix-It #2

1. Cropped Photo heavily on both sides and top

2. Ran Eye Candy Pretty Gritty Action omitted Grit and Punch

3. Dodged both eyes

4. Ran Eye Candy Lemon Fresh Overlay Action and adjusted from 30% opacity to 70% opacity

Fix-It #3

1. Ran Eye Candy Light Switch Action

2. Heavily crop left side of face

3. Crop small amount from top of frame and right side of frame

4. Run Eye Candy Pale & Interesting Action and tweaked it quite a bit

Fix-It #4

1. Cropped to square format

2. Ran Eye Candy Light Switch Action

3. Ran Eye Candy Dandelion Overlay and adjusted opacity to 100%

4. Ran Totally Rad Dirt Lip Texture and adjusted opacity to 45%

5. Dodged both eyes to brighten

6. Burn hair on right side of frame to darken

Fix-It #5

1. Crop left side of frame

2. Ran Totally Rad Troy Action and tweaked

3. Ran Totally Rad Brooklyn B&W Action and tweaked

4. Ran Eye Candy Lemon Fresh Overlay

5. Added Noise

6. Added Lens Flare

And that’s it! I would love to know if you guys like any of these and if you do, which one do you like best? If you don’t like any – well pffft to you! lol lol but I would be happy to know why as well.

Head on over to I heart faces to see loads more fixes!

Cheers

Kate