Last night I downloaded over 700 photos from my camera

Prepare for an onslaught of posts with photos...

I have just spent a happy half hour...

...playing with picmonkey (thanks Deb!) and editing a couple of photos of the solar system diorama. So much fun.

Here you go. This one is the "boost" lighting effect:

And the outside of the box. Chris left Aidan downstairs unsupervised for all of two minutes while he was  busy painting the words on and he managed to spell "system" incorrectly (he painted "g" instead of "y", which you can see he's tried to fix up):

I think I might be giving picmonkey a bit more of a workout over the next few days.

I rented a lens for my camera

An 85mm f/1.8D portrait lens. I'm trying it for a week to see if I'd use it enough to warrant buying one for myself (they don't come cheap new...around $400...although that's not as expensive as some lenses).

I love it already. I wonder how many photos I can take of the kids in seven days...

Adjusted my kite photo

To make the sky look more blue and the colours brighter. That's with the adjustments available on iPhoto. I wonder if I could do more if I had Photoshop Elements?

We have some Christmas money to spend...I might add Photoshop to the list for consideration. A Wii Fit is also on it. And maybe Mad Men DVDs.

Knowing us and the time it takes us to make these kinds of decisions, we'll still be deciding what to do with the money this time next year...

Tulips

My favourite flower. One of God's most amazing creations.

Even more cool is that my husband bought me some and I took these photos of them. I'm pretty happy with how they turned out.

Nothing like some art for a bit of inspiration

For the past week, the Swell outdoor sculpture festival has been on at Currumbin Beach. We take the kids for a look each year. It's become a bit of a tradition for us to go with friends of ours who have two daughters around the same age as our two boys.

The above photo wasn't taken by me, it's from the Swell website. I only ever discover creative ideas for photographing all the different works when I get home and find other people's (better) shots on the internet. I gave up taking photos about halfway through our walk this year because Rosie (in her sling) kept grabbing the camera and it was too hard for me to bend down to check out the best angles for shots. So Chris took most of our Swell photos this year.

Interestingly, when we go it is always our friends' two girls who want to get in there and climb all over the sculptures. Aidan always wants to read the little book you can buy that has the artists' descriptions of the meaning of their work. In fact, he often reads the book rather than actually getting up close to the sculpture itself. It's hard to get the book away from him so we can read it ourselves. Liam needs lots of encouragement to get in close enough to something so I can take a picture of him with it. Then there's a lot of comments along the lines of "put your nice smile on, pleeease", "stop making silly faces while I take the photo" etc etc.

Still, we always have fun. We have been to see it every year since we moved here. Last year it was one of Rosie's very first outings after we came home from hospital. This year, our church volunteered on a couple of shifts selling programs as part of our mission week. Every year we run into more and more people that we know when we go there. So it also creates a sense of belonging for us, of being part of a community.

But even if you don't live locally, this is highly recommended entertainment if you're visiting the Gold Coast in early September. You might see us there!