A-maze-ing light

We went out to Karaka today to the corn maze (at Spookers) and aside from being awesome fun it also had the most amazing light, which combined with an amazingly sunny, blue April day made for some great photo opportunities!

Here are some of my favourites from the day...

An awesome tree tunnel on the way to the maze that lets in all these slithers of light...  Ever since I was little I have loved tree tunnels (my favourite used to be the one you drove through on the way to Rotorua) and this one definitely rates as one of the coolest I have seen...

Miss B running through the tree tunnel (she was actually a bit freaked out after seeing the outside of Spookers so a tree tunnel was just a bit much...)

 The amazing maize

Squeezing through...

Looking very chic in the maze...

Checking the clues...

A bonus discovery on the way home - Clarks Beach...

Colour my world

This weeks theme was colour so not surprisingly it features the girls pretty heavily as they bring colour to our lives every day.

We were also lucky enough this week to have the most amazing sunsets and lots of opportunities to play that saw even more colour than usual.  It made it really hard to choose favourites, especially over the past 2 days so I am cheating and having 10 photo's this week....

My 5 year old is getting more and more into photography and constantly amazes me how she can set up a great shot.  She spends ages looking around for what she wants to photograph and then takes her time setting up a perfect shot.  She spots things I would never think of and they look great.  She is still working on the technique for taking photo's (hey, at 5 it's hard to even hold a heavy camera still!) but once she gets that she is going to be amazing!  She loves hearing what the theme is each week and this one was one of her particular favourites so we had a lot of collaboration this week.  She actually wants her own blog for her photos to be like Mummy so watch this space, and in the mean time it is awesome to have a little helper out and about with me.

Here is our colourful week....

6 April - Hanging out at the Easter show - so much colour and so hard to decide so I actually have 3 photo's for this day (which is a good cull from the 600 I took!!!)

The first is my favourite of the week - I love the joy on their faces as they had just tumbled down the big slide together - one of the 25 rides they went on yesterday!!

Miss B holding the moon in her hands on top of One Tree Hill after the sun went down on the Easter Show...

Beautiful colour with the setting sun coming through the trees...

 5 April - my best discovery of the week, an awesome quiet place (which is close to home) to take photo's of the sunset...  I love how the pink clouds reflect in the water...  I love it so much I have to cheat and have 2 photo's for that too....

4 April, my little pink bunny on her easter egg hunt at daycare...

3 April - Colour, colour, colour.  This was a dual effort between me and Miss B, with me behind the camera and her art directing...

2 April - A colourful flower...

1 April - my beautiful girl...

31 March - fluffy bottom goose...

Making time....

Week 13 this week and the theme was time, or maybe food or colour so just be on the safe side I had a play with a couple of these...

I, like most Mums, struggle to find enough time in the day to get through everything I need to in the day, let alone swanning off to take pictures.  This week though I made a conscious effort to make more time to take photo's and even went off for a couple of hours on Saturday to take photo's of Aunty Julie's dragon boating and then roped the girls into coming along for a few sunset photo's....

Here are this week's photo's....

30 March - playing with colour and the white balance in this shot of the sun setting

29 March - Making it happen!!  Not the best light for the photo but I love the attitude too much to not include it

28 March - Quality Time...  This is from Bella and my 'sunset shoot'.  I set up the camera on the tripod with the right settings and then Bella set up the shot and took the photo.

27 March - my favourite photo this week.  I wasn't really getting much movement in the shot so I asked Bella to give Soph a little push....



26 March - Running out of time to cook dinner and get the girls into bed!!  Still stuck in the city in traffic at 6.17pm!

25 March - my little spinning top...

24 March - The Pink Dragons

Lots of celebrations, not so much progress

So this weeks theme was progress which I have to say I did appallingly badly at, managing to get only one 'progress' photo for the week.

We did have an awesome week though with lots of celebrations, kicking off with our 7 year wedding anniversary, Uncle Don visiting from the US in the middle and then finishing with Aaron's birthday.

Here is what we have been up to this week...

23 March - Aaron's birthday cake designed by the girls.  Lesson to young players, don't surround tall candles with lots of little candles - they will melt and flop!

22 March - Progress!  This is progress as measured by Auckland City's sky scape. St Patricks Cathedral opened 15 March 1885 and next to it Sky Tower opened 3 March 1997 – 112 years later.   I liked the juxtaposition of the old and the new, the saintly and the not so...

21 March - time for cuddly

20 March - Rainy Day at Victoria Park

19 March - Welcome to NZ Uncle Don

18 March - Looking out over the city

17 March - Happy Anniversary

And of course Happy St Patricks Day....

Play time

Week 11 and this week's theme was Toys.

My breakthrough moment this week actually occurred in a supplier presentation.  We were at the Floating Pavilion at the Viaduct and the super yachts had just came in which along with all the bobbing up and down with each boat that came in made it a bit hard to concentrate, so instead of concentrating on online measurement metrics I found my mind drifting to what settings I should use to take a photo of the action outside the windows.  

Unfortunately for me my camera was back at my desk, although I did have my little cheapy camera though so as soon as it was over I set out to see what I could capture.  My little camera had never been out of auto in it's life so I didn't even know if it had a manual setting, let alone how to use it.  I have got so used to using my 'proper' camera and letting it take full credit for amazing photo's that it was a real moment for me to discover that I had actually learnt some skills that were transferable and I proved to myself that I was doing more than pointing and shooting when I knew exactly what to do to get the shot.

The end result was my favourite photo of the week (12th of March).  I just love all the activity that is happening on the boat, even when it is out of the water.  I actually found out later that the Telefonica had suffered some damage to her hull as she was coming in to Auckland which just kind of made it that much better that I inadvertently captured the cherry picker going up to check out the damage.

And finally, a big thank you to my girls for letting me play with their toys this week! 

16 March - steady hands...

15 March - the Sylvanians go cruising - bad Mummy with very bad role modelling to the kids taking this picture on the road!!  A few nervous moments from the girls as I took this picture!

14 March - the end outcome of my night time 'shoot' in the play room after the girls went to bed...

13 March - playing with trains

12 March - a very expensive toy!

11 March - the duck in the Gelli Baff!!!  The one and only time the girls will have a jelly bath before our new bath arrives!  If you have kids, definitely worth a try - weird stuff!

10 March - the dragon roller coaster at the Kumeu Show

Kiwiana

Week 10 and I think I am starting to get the hang of this a bit...

The theme this week was Kiwiana and I had great fun looking for things that are Kiwi.  I would like to say that I wasn't to cliche with it but I think I hit all the major cliches!

The best thing I have found about taking up this challenge is that it forces me to go out and look for new things to take photo's off which in turn gets us out of our normal routine and out of the house.  This week we have gone trekking through the bush, to the beach, out in Grandma's garden and even baking in the quest for the photo of the day!

I have also found that the girls patience is increasingly tiring with the incessant click of my camera - cumulating in my eldest refusing to allow another photo to be taken until I paid her!!  On the plus side, I have found that paid models complain a lot less...  ;-)

9 March - Buzzy Bee sampling our flowers...

8 March - a little find in Grandma's garden...

7 March - Chocolate Fudge out of the Edmond's Cook Book - it has to be a Kiwi Tradition!

6 March - Jandals (it has to be done!)

5 March - Tomato Sauce with a side of meat

4 March - the sunlight just hit this perfectly through the trees in the bush and I managed to get this photo before the mossies ate us alive!

3 March - Cloudy with a chance of Weather Bombs

Up!

Week 9 and the theme this week is up! 

I had a great time this week and actually managed to stick to the theme (sometimes tenuously) for the whole week.  I spent more time looking up than I ever have before (which when you sit for an hour and a half watching the sun come up is definitely a good thing).

I have also noticed how much I say up - "Get up, we're going to be late", "Don't pick your sister up", "Quick, up the stairs to Grandma's house", "No, you are not going up, 3 year old girls can walk" and my personal favourite "Don't climb up the pantry shelves".  Now none of these made for good photo's, but we did experiment with helium balloons on the 29th which resulted not in a photo of the helium balloons so much but in the look of shock on Miss S's face as her sisters balloon disappeared up behind the clouds!

So here is our week of 'Up'. 

2 March - Birds UP on a fence

1 March - Looking UP at the rain coming down

29 February - Balloon UP and out of here

28 February - Sun UP (hands down the best hour and a half of my week)

27 February - Going UP

26 February - Stepping UP

25 February - Climbing UP