Sucker Send-off

I have a new obsession that has sucked up my time. Its like a vortex whirling around and mesmerizing me. Its Pinterest, a site that you can post things of interest and others can view and share. Kinda like a bulletin board meets facebook.

I have a board just full of things I'd like to make or do. One of those things were these giant lollipops. I saw the photo and thought, "I can recreate that!" but I needed an occasion. Luckily, my friend was leaving our company and I got the chance.




I used gift wrapping paper rolls, wrapped them in white kraft paper (using glue tape along the length) then blew up balloons and wrapped those in cello bags held together with scotch tape. They came out so cute!

Then I made banners with the words: It SUCKS Ur LEAVING.

For kicks, I threw in some real lollipops. My idea was to make the word SUCKS out of the lollipops so I bought this humongous bag. Turns out I didn't need nearly that many.

My friend was really happy with his decorated office, even if he spent the day doling out candy.

Cooperative Kids or How to Photograph a group of kids

When it comes to photography, there isn't any such thing as cooperative kids. Which is why I thought I would give a little photography tutorial. How do you get a great shot of a group of kids without making it look photoshopped? You have to start with the right kind of shots. Not the right shots. Because if you can get those anytime you want, you wouldn't be reading this.

The first thing you have to do is gather the kids. Here are some key clues:

Feed them

Let them sleep

Tell them what's happening.

Tired kids are cranky. Period. There is nothing more you need to know. No one wants to work with a cranky kid - especially their parent. Trust me.

Same goes for hungry kids. Cranky. See above.

Prepare your kids. As with most things, let them know what is going to happen. If they think they are going to the park to play with their friends, and you suddenly make them sit still and smile - they'll feel duped. Then they'll get cranky. See above again.

Just tell them that you are going to have all the kids sit together, smile really nicely, be happy to be together. Then Mommy (or Daddy - or whomever) will take a few quick pictures. I usually add: If you smile really nicely, look right at the camera, then we will be done much quicker and then they can play longer.

These are pretty simple precepts for doing anything with kids. Eat, Sleep and Information.

Once you get to your location, get rid of any overt distractions. Don't bring balls, bikes, dolls and lay them all out. If having any of these helps focus your child, bring them along. In a bag. Try taking the photos just using your vocal commands. Get other parents to place themselves directly behind you and call to their kids. Try these things first. Once toys come out, their focus is all over the place and you may even lose a kid or two to a truck, never to return again.

Let me go back to the parents helping. If you have many parents trying to take the same shot, you will NEVER get all the kids looking into your camera. Every kid will instinctively hear their own parents and look in that direction. If this is an important shot, have each parent take turns quickly shooting. Or give all the shots to the best photoshopper. Otherwise, if you are the only photographer, its important that the parents who are calling out to their kids is directly in front of you (under the camera) or directly behind or over you. That way, when the child looks up, they are also looking at the camera.

Now for the actual photos.

Get down on their level. Kneel, sit, squat. Otherwise you will get a shot that looks unnatural or uncomfortable. When the camera is parallel to the children, the photos look engaged and the people don't look distorted.

Take a LOT of shots. My unofficial rule of thumb is about 2-4 shots per kid. With digital, thats totally feasible. Your goal is to get one nice shot of each kid so you can composite them in Photoshop later. Above are the photos that I pieced together to make the final layout.

Back-Up Plan When in doubt have an alternate game plan set. For example. I wanted to take a group shot of a bunch of kids sitting down, arms around each other. I decided this when they were all playing. No notice, half of them had not eaten, TONs of toys all over the place. Whats a girl to do?

I tried to get them to sit down. I even got off a few initial shots. Then mayhem. Kids were annoyed, some ran off. You get the idea. So my back-up plan came into play.

Original plan: line up the kids sitting, arms around each other.

Back-up plan: Shoot each kid standing, happy, smiling, then photoshop them together later. More work, but could work.

Then Photoshop.There is a lot of controversy these days about parents photoshopping their kids. This is not what the uproar is about. This is just preserving your mental state, not for the sake of looking perfect. Sanity vs vanity. I addded heads, took away feet, removed fingers, added bodies, took bodies away. But, an hour later, I had a great shot that I could actually use.

Here is the final

NOTE These guys are: Irish, Italian, Chinese, Portuguese, Isrealie, Russian and Korean. Crazy, huh?

School's over

...and that meansTeacher Thank you gifts. This year was easy (and hard) for me. My son graduated out of The Goddard School (sniff, sniff) so I took pictures of every kid on my son's class, contorted into the letters of the alphabet and made a poster for the school.
For the teachers and staff, I created Thank You cards. It was a practical and personal gift. Some of these teachers have known these kids since they were mearly a few months old. Here is what the card looks like.


and I did hang cards from the wine bottles we gave to the teaching staff. I was pretty thrilled with the idea because even if we just got them a fruit arrangement from Edible Arrangements, we would have spent about the same as 2 cases of wine - once we got the 'case' discounts.



I used paper from MScraps' June Collab: The Things You Do - a perfect kit for father's day. I don't recall where I got the stitching from.

Here is the poster that I made from the photos I took. I presented the school with the poster along with the teacher's gifts.

Food fun - its Grill Time!

Happy Post 4th of July, everyone!

As the weekend approached, I got an email from Michaels showing these way cool cupcakes that looked like little grills. I put my own touches to it but basically, they are the same. Here are the ones I made.



Here are the 'instructions':

Fill silver foil cupcake liners about 2/3 full with packaged cake mix.
After baking and cooling, level off the cupcakes with a knife so that they are flat.
Ice with dark Chocolate frosting. I used Dunken Hines' Whipped Dark Chocolate.

Sprinkle Red sanding sugar in the center to simulate hot coals.
Select Black ready to use Wilton icing. Using a round piping tip, evenly squeeze lines across the icing to simulate the grill bars. (Michaels suggested silver bars using a mix of black and white - I don't know about you guys, but my grill has been black since day one. lol)

For the candies, I used yellow Jelly Belly jelly beans, wrapped with the green part of fruit roll ups. Did you guys know how hard it is to find green fruit roll ups? I ended up having to buy a mixed box of 3 different types, and cut the green part off of a 'double-sided' kind. This is sorta what the box looked like, only mine didn't come with tatoos.

To make the steaks, I cut the caramels into 3rds so that they were thinner and pinched them in at the bottom a bit.

The hotdogs were the pink and red Mike and Ike candies. And the burgers were some random bug shaped gummies I'd found and pressed way into the icing.


To make the grill marks on the candy, used cake decorating pens. They came in a set of 4 different colors in the baking aisle. They didn't have black, so I ended up using blue and they seemed to work just fine.

Challenges

While I was on my forced internet hiatus, I wasn't able to download any new kits or files, but I did manage to spend some time on some of the challenges they have at MScraps. Let me first explain why I love doing the challenges. Being new-ish to digi-scrapping, I have found that challenges on the scrapping sites were a great way to push myself and learn new techniques. What I love about the challenges on MScraps is that they have something for everyone, the newbie and the more seasoned scrapper.

Here are some pics from the last month's miscellaneous challenge by Jenny -which was to take one subject and photoshop 3 images onto one photo. I LOVED this challenge. LOVE, love, LOVE it.


Credits: Kit Playground by Jady Day Designs, Paper: The Things You Do/Mscraps June Collab

We all love getting comments on our posts. My favorite comment I got with this layout was one where someone said, Triplets, how cool!. LOL. Lordy, if I had triplets, I think I'd be in an asylum. lol

This page I did using Sherry Ferguson's Tropical Paradise kit (available at ScrapMatters) for MScraps' Miscellaneous Challenge for June. The assignment was to scrap a page with part of your image extruded out.


Credits: Kit: Tropical Paradise by Sherry Ferguson Designs, Paper: The Things You Do/MScraps June Collab

Back from 'hiatus'

When technology works, its great. When it doesn't it can just about stop all progress if you've come to rely on it. And I have. My internet was barely working (like 20 mins here, 10 mins there) and it was beyond frustrating. Then we thought we'd fixed it, and it'd be out again. Needless to say, I haevn't been much in the digiworld during the past two months. But I haven't been stopped either.

I'll start by posting my latest pages and work backward until I catch up.

Here is Wimpy Chomper's latest kit: He's Out of This World, available at ScrapMatters. She does the funnest kits, perfect for kiddie shots.


And here is my page Blast OFF, created with it.

Weather - Theme shots

I had some internet issues and didn't get to go online for nearly 2 weeks. Its almost unfathomable, isn't it? I seriously don't know how I did it!

Well, I missed last week's photo theme but I still took some shots. My scrapping pal, Romy, came up with the idea of 'Weather' as the theme. I thought it was a really intriguing idea. Then of course, its been non-stop raining. Well, Rain is a weather condition, isn't it? The first couple of shots are through my office window.


Weather Rolling In


Weather Through the Window



And finally, on Mother's Day weekend, the sun peeked out. A little. Even though it got covered right up again, we had one nice day, so I had to shoot it.

Semi-Sunny

Nikon D5100 - my new treasure

TA DA!
Here she is. My new toy. This was shot with my Torch blackberry - but here it is with my camera bag. LOVE THEM!!!!


Just testing out the new camera. I am sooo happy with it. Words can't describe it, so here are some test shots:

I was wondering how to organize it on the blog, so I'm posting the shots chronologically - all shots are taken in NYC unless otherwise noted.

Night vision in Times Sq.
The night I got the camera, my friend, Alana, drove me down to Penn. This is smack in the middle of Times Square. I took a bunch of shots and various settings, but the motion blur was pronounced in all of them (probably because not only was the street scene in motion, but our car was, too. Then I tried the Night Vision feature. This is what I got.

Here is one of the first shots, taken along 3rd Ave on my walk up from Five Guys (yes, PMS bad eating - lol). They have the Spring flowers up and each gigantic planter was more beautiful than the last.

Spring. finally


View down 28th Street (I think it was 28th - wonder if this thing has geo-tagging?)


Shadowy Swirls (original)
This is the same as the one in my Curves theme, except not in night vision mode.


Outside Penn
This is the view North toward Times Square, just before I ran for the NJ Transit train.




Streaming Pop News
This is one of my favorite shots of the night.



Paella
I took this using the 'food' setting of the camera. Delish, too!


And the crab legs...
(my friend's boyfriend got the left overs. Unfortunately, all that was left was the baked potato and green beans! lol lol lol )



Hot
This is silly, but this was the first shot I took using the Food feature. Its so crisp and real!


Keyboard
What I love about this one is that the shelf this was on was in complete darkness. There was a bit of ambient light that filtered onto the front of the keyboard, but the night vision setting took a really cool, grainy bw shot.



I just love this shot because its got such an edgy, urban feel to it.



And the last one - cliche, I know, but what is more NY than the Empire State Bldg?
And red hot at that. :)

Photography Theme: Curves

What a crazy week. Ups, downs, exhaustion - you name it. Still I made time to roam around and take some shots for the Curves theme.

Shadowy Swirls



Camera Nikon D5100, Exposure 0.017 sec (1/60), Aperture f/5.6, Focal Length 18 mm, Focal Length 18.3 mm, Flash Off, Did not fire,
Lens FStops 5.33, Scene Night Vision, Color Monochrome

This shot was taken using the Night Vision setting on under the Scenes feature of my new camera. I just loved how the light and shade combined to make the playful shapes on the concreate as they filtered from the shop window.


Column Curves


Camera Nikon D5100, Exposure 0.077 sec (1/13), Aperture f/3.5, Focal Length 18 mm, Focal Length 18.3 mm, ISO Speed 3200, Exposure Bias 0 EV, Flash Off, Did not fire

Neither rain, nor sleet, nor ...well, you can read it yourself on the top of the main post office between 32rd and 34th Street and 8th Avenue. I love the majesty of the building with the bustle of the street traffic.

Number Curves



Camera Nikon D5100, Exposure 0.033 sec (1/30), Aperture f/5.6, Focal Length 55 mm, ISO Speed 3200, Exposure Bias 0 EV, Flash Auto, Fired, Return detected

The catty corner view of the building awning made the triple 3s standout in my nighttime walk.



As you can see, I'm fascinated with low light shots and I'm trying to play with my new camera shooting in the various settings.

Thanks for checking out my shots!

Themed Weekly Photographers

Here is a list of everyone who has joined in the MScraps' 'challenge yourself ' theme photo exercise. Be sure to check out their awesome shots and follow them if you like what you see.

If you want to read more or just join in on the chatter, you can find the posts in this forum over at Mscraps


Heather T's Blog: http://oohlalaartsy.blogspot.com


Linda (Scrapporreia)'s Blog: http://www.scrapporreia.blogspot.com

Meg of OceanWideDesigns' Blog: http://www.oceanwidedesigns.com

Romy's Blog: http://by-romy.blogspot.com/


Reminder:The idea is to have a theme to shoot a set of photos over a week's time. This will hone your eye and give you practice with your camera. You're only challenging yourself, so shoot what you can. Make something fit, or see how it doesn't fit. Just have fun with it.

C'mon -- join us!

Today my baby turns 5

I'm so proud of the little boy he's growing into and sad to see the parts of him that are a little baby fade away. This one little guy gives me more joy and genuinely melts my heart more than I ever thought anything could.

Happy Birthday my little love!

Here is a shot of his school birthday cupcake. I made 30 of them. yeah, THIRTY. That's a mama's love, huh?



Help, my house is infested with catepillars... cupcakes, that is!

Theme photo blogging - announcement

I'm a regular participator in MScraps. I love their designers, the store is awesome (and why I'm always broke!) and the ladies there are so varied, creative, supportive, caring and I could go on and on. Its a place I feel I can throw ideas out and get real feedback and tons of back up.

Recently, there has been a lot of chatter about buying new cameras, comparisons, brands, etc. It led me to think (because, yes, I am also waiting for the Nikon D5100 to get to my store!) that I loved doing the Theme Photo blogging 'contest' after I got my D70 slr. It wasn't just the contest; it was the fact that it forced me to get out and shoot. I'd go for walks at lunch with my friends and it was so much fun to talk about our shots and what made it hard, what we liked, etc. I started a thread in MScraps to invite some of the ladies to join me in a self-challenge - a blogging circle of photography.

Interested in joining?

Here is how it will work:
4 Themes a month (theoretically one them per week)
Pick 3 - 5 of your favorite shots
Post to your blogs All blogs will be listed after I get some takers (bonus:we can each post the full list of blogs and the link back to mScraps' forum)
Everyone comments, reviews, critiques, etc.
We'll start on May 1, Sunday and the week will end on Sat (May 8)

Benefits: more photos, better shooting increase traffic and 'followers' to our own blogs Can get photo help from a group of fellow photogs

Example from a theme photo contest I ran a few years ago: We chose Circles as our first theme and we all had to shoot things that reminded us of the word. Shots included: Bi-circles (bike tires), retro lamps, the moon, ironwork around NYC, puddles, etc.

THEMES (thank you for those of you who sent in your suggestions prior to this thread) Be sure to name each of your shots - sometimes a clever title makes the shot that much more appealing. :) And it helps if we end up comments about it in the thread, we dont have to say: the one with the blue. lol

WEEK OF
May 1: Curves (hints: Many things curve; the curve of a body, curls in hair, winding roads, or you can to to the opposite extreme: lack of curves - as long as it relates)
May 8: Weather (hints: This outside the box, don't shoot just rain or sun, challenge yourself.)
May 15: Anticipation (hints: lots of us have kids/grandkids - there are so many possibilities here for them, but we can do inanimate things, too: plants prebud, ketchup dripping, an envelope)
May 22: Double takes - This one requires 2 photos; 2 things that look or seem similar (hints: obviously twins, two uses for the same thing, reflections, -- there are so many possibilities to this one.

The other photographers can come and comment on your shots.(I'm planning on posting the full list on my blog as well). Don't worry if you don't do each week at the same time as I've dated them. Whenever you shoot and post, we'll all be taking a look (and those like me, will surely be commenting).

This is just to get us all out and shooting. Practice makes perfect. The more we shoot the better our pictures have to become. Once I see how much interest we get in this, I can post a longer schedule. :)

If you know of a budding photog, send them to this thread at Mscraps so they can join in on the fun, too!

My little patch out back

I love being outside (minus the bugs and the animals - lol ). So I decided to make it feel more like me. My son has the whole house, my husband has the garage. I don't have a room thats just for me. So, for the few months of decent weather, I want my own space.

April Food Break

All this scrapping and creating makes you hungry, no? I thought the time was ripe for a food break. heh heh heh

I'll start with my April Fool's treats. I made these worm riddled apples for my son's lunch bag and it came out so cute that I decided to make 2 more for each of his teachers. They loved them and one of them saved it to take home to show her son. :) I love a 'pay it forward'.

I saw this 'treat' on a site or a magazine and I can't recall which, or else I'd give them their due credit. Here is how it was done, I trimmed a gummy worm, used a paring knife and dug out a hole. Then dripped some lemon juice inside to keep it fresh. To keep the gummy candy from getting too gooey too quickly, I dabbed the hole after a little bit. Then I shoved the cut side of the worm in. That's it!

Next Up are Cake Pops. You seen these online a ton of times by now. There are many variations: cake mixed with a binder (like cream cheese), straight up cake baked in ball shapes, or scooped out to ball shapes. Covered with a chocolate concoction, covered with frosting then fondant, frosting and dipped in chocolate, and so on. These were from my local Starbucks on Third and 48th in NYC. Rocky Road, Birthday Cake and Tiramisu. They were a little too sweet for me, but I wanted to try them, so I had to buy 'em. Cute though, huh?

For my DHs birthday, we had some of our close friends and their kids over on Saturday night. For his actual birthday, I didn't want him not to have a cake, so I picked up this peanut butter silk pie at Perkins. They have some yummy pies. I topped it with these colorful, rubber, finger puppets (available at Target). Aren't they hideously cute?

Blog Train Freebies with The Design Girl

Happy April Fool's Day! The start of the month, the beginning of Spring, and what better way to start than with a new Sprint kit from The Design Girl and a whole blog train of freebies? Here is her Hop To It kit. How cute are those little bunnies and chickies?? Here is a layout I did with the kit from last year's Easter Egg hunt down in VA.This is our adorable God-daughter (and neice) on her first Easter Egg Hunt.


I have create 4.25 x 5.5 printable labels for those Easter gifts or just to use as a fun mailing label. Click on the preview below to download the files. Then be sure to scroll down so that you can find all the other free goodies by The Design Girl's CT team.

Your next stop is Andrea's blog

If you lose your way you can find the whole list of blog's here :

Linda/Scrapporreia (you are here) - http://www.scrapporreia.blogspot.com/

Andrea - http://grandmasgotworms.blogspot.com/

Sharon - http://quietangelsb.blogspot.com/

Emma - http://scrappy-dappy-doo.blogspot.com/

Kris - http://myworldinscraps.blogspot.com/

Tamara - http://www.yesterdaytodaytamara.blogspot.com/

Donna - http://www.scrappydonna.blogspot.com/

Ulrika - http://www.ulrikaulrika.se/

Enjoy the goodies!

Be sure to check out some of the other freebies on this site before you go - click on Freebies on the tab above.

And I wanted to thank Danielle, her CT lead Andrea and all the other ladies for making me feel so welcome this month as a CT guest. It was a blast!