2012 MMDT April Challenge #1

"By the Dawn's Early Light"   (Take outdoor photos in the early morning light . Let the light and shadows inspire you. Note the time of day photos were taken on your page.)

As it turns out...getting up for the "early light" became the least of my problems with this project! Fortunately for me, I began the photographing when "dawn" was after 7:30 am. then comes...  

Problem #1 overcast, cloudy or rainy mornings. So I took a cloudy dawn and waited until the sun poked through the clouds as they began to break up  or the sky cleared. The perfect places for this assignment "Bull Run" statues in downtown Dallas or the "Sooners" statues in Oklahoma City. the problem...I'm in Ohio. I really wanted something where a lot of angles and surfaces to pick up and reflect the light. What I finally landed up doing is skipping the cemetery (my next idea) and going to Kaleidoscope and Memorial Park. The first shots begin at 7:53:16 in Memorial Park and ended back there almost an hour later at 8:51:33. In between I climbed the playground equipment doing my best to get some of the interesting spots and hopefully some unique shadows. I  did get a scolding from my youngest daughter when she saw some of the views..."What were you doing up THERE?"  I simply explained it didn't worry me until I realized my phone was in the car, so if I fell, or got stuck it was going to be a loooooong day. No one in their right mind would be at the playground in 40* weather.

Problem #2 was a title. Discarding several I went with "By the Dawn's Early Light". I was really happy with it until I came to upload and saw Linda's title was nearly the same. So, do I go back and change it to "Shadowlands" or leave it?  As you can see, I've left it...all I can say is great minds think alike!

 A long time admirer of Ansel Adams photography, I thought I'd turn each  of the photos into Black and White to accentuate the shadows in the photos, and nuetralize the palette.  I actually tried a few in sepia to compare and found I liked that better. I then chose the Mosiac Moments Cocoa Grid Paper that I had just received...they looked great together. Then having this old timey feel going, I found a font to complement it: SNF Darcy. I chose a steampunk embossing folder to treat the sections of woodland cardstock that filled in a few sections. I printed my title on Oatmeal cardstock and used a set of border stamps from Technique Tuesdays for the border, using "Sepia" Archival Ink.  Each of the time tags were brushed with Jumbo Java Versa Magic chalk to help them blend into the overall picture.

A helpful tool to use in this assignment was a free download from www.snapncrop.com  that Tami has designed, Crossword Planning Sheet. I have first used it to document the layout I came up with for this challenge and I will add it to my stack of Tami's pattern pages (find them online at the site or at her blog) to possibly use in the future.

Then I used the same layout in Print Shop to block some colors for each of the sections so that the times could be easily read here...another element in the challenge. The tags on the photos don't show up very well. So I thought this would help to see them.

Problem #3 trying to get crisp clear photos to upload. I am totally disappointed in the quality of the shots of the completed layouts, I'm not sure if it's my camera or the various lighting conditions, or the fact that I turned everything into Sepia tones and it wasn't photographing well. The indivual photos turned out well in sepia. I printed them to fit the space by setting my borders at sizes to let me trim to fit without sacrificing the too much of the photo.

The hope was to let the shadows themselves do the talking. This is one assignment that really looks better in person. Now! I'm off to see everyone else's layout! Thanks for stopping by!

andrea