A Flurry of Fun

 

We've been letting our hair down in Dixon Hill land! 

The weather has kept us snowbound for so long (lots of events cancelled of late) that now the big melt has actually happened, we’re catching up on lost play-time. 

As fortune would have it, this was the weekend of the annual ceilidh to raise funds for the local hospice. A perfect chance to let loose and have some very serious fun! 

Mine was the task of putting pots of flowers on the tables. So Joss and I made a foraging expedition on Saturday morning….scouring the hedgerows for anything that might brighten the evening with a bit of wild and festive freshness. 

We found plenty of treasure, despite the time of year: smooth, crimson dogwood; spruce of all sorts; starkly bare bilberry stems; cotoneaster berries glowing like little orange-red pearls; and some wonderful weeds that had dried a deep russet brown. 

I added euonymus and ivy flowers from the garden; and tossed in some lush red roses and spray carnations bought the day before. 

Pretty little posies they were, in their raffia-tied pots. They graced the tables while the dancers whirled about them….and the roses even came in handy for playing the clown! 

 

9 year old Eleanor – a natural court jester! 

Abstract

After a year of occasional snapping with the little green camera….and another year of slightly more serious shooting for the purposes of this blog….my understanding of photography has shifted in a big way this week.

Up until now, I thought that photographs should come out of the camera in as finished a form as possible.  I saw only three reasons for playing about in Picnik or negotiating the (to me) unfathomable mysteries of Photoshop:

1)  If you were a sub-standard shooter who needed to rescue a less-than ideal image
2)  If you wanted to collage or resize pictures
3)  If you were a seriously amazing photographer who had reason to do clever things that are, at the moment, utterly beyond my comprehension

How wrong I was!

Suddenly, I get that an out-of-the-camera image is simply a starting point….raw material for a whole lot of creative fun.   And I’ve been helping myself to some of that fun!

Above is a picture of a tree I shot one morning this week with my Lensbaby.  Below is what happened after losing myself in textures and colour for an hour or two….manipulating it to create something atmospheric and - I hope - rather delicious.

Do you like it?

Funky New Skirt

I found the funkiest skirt in Germany.  It has two attached pockets, one of which is just the perfect size for an iPhone.  Ideal for a now hipstamatically-obsessed girl!

Moshiki does have a very small number of skirts for sale online (very small equals one at the moment).  Though if you happen to live in Germany, Austria, Switzerland or the Netherlands then you can actually find these darlings in a store.  Each one is a unique combination of fabrics….a total one-off.

Haven’t taken mine off since I got it.  It’ll be worn out soon.  Which might just necessitate another trip onto the continent….

Hipstamatic Heaven

I have wanted an iPhone for soooooo long (yes, former technophobe, now-totally-converted gadget wizardress, me).

Most of the reason I wanted that iPhone so badly was because I lusted after ye famous Hipstamatic app*.  I drooled daily over all the artsy photos that online friends produced with it and yearned to do the same.

Well, last week my wonderful husband finally came up trumps and delivered into my hands my very own, seriously beautiful iPhone.  And no sooner was it in my hot little paws than I was downloading the longed-for app.

Now I’m obsessed.  Totally.  I’m taking retro shot after retro shot and you couldn’t prize this little gem from my sweaty mitts for all the Blackberries in the world.  I just love the unpredictability of the results.  I adore the images I can create.

So, if I’m inundating you with collage after collage of rose-tinted (or sepia-tinted or blue-tinted….) pictures at the moment, you’ll forgive me.  There are lots more where these are coming from, believe me.  And ever more to come.

Told you.  I’m obsessed.

* For those not conversant with the world of iPhones and apps, Hipstamatic is a devilishly clever way of accumulating a massive stack of what appear to be old, film-camera images.  Which rock.

P.S. Oh, and these ones above were taken last week - just in case you thought the snow had magically vanished!  (It hasn’t.)

P.P.S.  And today I’m taking part in Mosaic Monday, hosted by Mary at Little Red House.  Why not pop on over and take a look at some of the other lovely mosaics you’ll find links to there?

Pink Walk