The 30 day self portrait challenge is done and dusted and it was a hard one. I admit to some artistic license on some, but they are all me! Taking pictures of yourself on a daily basis is weird, vain (there I said it) and frankly a bit boring, after all, not much changes. Having said that, it was a fun challenge and I made it to the end! Thanks to the A Beautiful Mess girls for throwing it down!
Monthly, daily, weekly challenges. Do you love then or do you hate them. Or do you love the idea of them and hate that you never stick with them? I have been doing the photo a day challenge with prompts provided by Chantelle at Fat Mum Slim for almost a year now and it is now totally part of my day no matter how busy I am. Some photos are snaps which barely meet the prompt and some are worked on with filters and all sorts of nonsense from a variety of apps. I started the daily photo thing with Hipstamatic who also do a prompt based challenge on Instagram. I love the Hipstamatic app, but I don’t want to have to use it for every photo. I saw a challenge on A Beautiful Mess today – The 30 day self portrait challenge. My initial reaction was holy squashed avocados, even I don’t want to see a month of photos of me! Why would any modest person want to do this, blah blah, blah. Then …
This week saw the very exciting launch of the A Beautiful Mess iPhone app. Emma and Elsie at ABM had been talking up the app for a few weeks, would it live up to the hype? Yes, yes it does. It is available internationally and costs 99c here in the US. There is a great base of doodles and frames, texts and filters. Not many filters, but there are so many filter apps available, I wasn’t too bothered about that. I loved the doodles and borders options. They have a ton of colour options too and if you layer them up, you can get some fab effects! My Sindy doll helped me experiment with the A Beautiful Mess app! In the top photo, she is sporting a vintage 1970’s original crocheted dress which I think my Mum made, the ukulele/guitar is also vintage (from way back when I was a little girl). I added various borders, adding layers and colours. I love the effect of lots of the same layers, just moved slightly. In the …
I snapped some tree reflections this morning on the way to school. I flipped them and popped on a filter in Camera +. One of the many advantages of walking to school every day, we get to spot the cool stuff and I get to photo it. Bodhi assures me that walking to school gets his brain working every morning! Who am I to argue?! #52lists ‘Great Things I have read lately’. I liked this weeks list, I will read anything which stands still long enough! ‘The Vanishing of Katherina Linden’ is an audio book I picked up from the library because I liked the cover! Yes, I do choose books by the cover quite often! I always choose wine by picking the label I like best, because I am a wine expert…… Anyway, I have just started to listen to this book and I like it so far. In the first few sentences someone explodes, so that’s a promising start. Dark humour is one of my favourites. http://www.abeautifulmess.com, written by sisters Emma …
Clare Davis Etheridge 