a celebration of southern mothers

alice lynne abernethy; albemarle, nc; 1962, courtesy of amelia matthews via g&g

garden & gun put together this lovely tribute photo gallery of southern mothers.  i am always a sucker for old photos and this gallery hits the spot.

just give me...

a couple of hours and my camera and there is great fun to be had.  i rarely have time alone.  i am either at work or being mama so when tula mirth attended a "drop-off" birthday party yesterday evening i felt amiss at what to do with myself at first.  silly me.  i am never lonely when i have cameras.  i spent some time catching up on some neighborhood graffiti and later drifted to a buddy's house (also a photographer) and well, we took lots of photos and laughed.  the last photo of the day was of the giant pink unicorn tattooed on my daughter's cheek during the birthday party. 

all photos by juli

Do you Picnik?

Today I thought I would share some photo fun that can be had with Picnik.  Picnik is photo editing on line for free, you don't have to download anything either, so more space for all your photos.  They offer artistic effects, stickers, frames, touch up, scrap booking and so much more.  I always use it for photos on here even if its just to resize photos so they load quickly and easily (I find 500 best).  The site is easy to use and even has auto fix buttons for extra help. 

Here is an example of one I have played with today, I resized and cropped, auto fixed the exposure and made the colours vibrant.  I then added a frame and some text.  As you can see they even have a before and after option.  They do have an upgrade option and for around $22 for the year I have found it well worth it, but its not necessary. 

You can also make colleges and I use that quite often for this blog, I am thinking of making my Christmas cards with them as they have snow effects and all sorts.  Some things are cheesy but its all good fun and you can happily while away a rainy afternoon.

My most favourite tool is the touch up, you can air brush yourself, remove wrinkles and basically play at being Madonna.  Teeth whitening, self tanning, change your hair and eye colour.  Its such good fun,  I am no professional so I can end up looking worse and I don't tend to use those photos but its such fun and makes you feel so much better when you see photos in magazine,  they are so re done and really they look just like us.  You can also give your self a great moustache if you so choose (well it is Movember).

They have all sorts, this is my beautiful niece Brooke using one of the scrapbook pages.  Go play and have some fun.

I hope you are all having a great start to the new week.  

ax