Hey friends and fans. It just occurred to me that I haven't posted anything here in several years, since I established my newer blog at Typepad. Please visit me at: FeeFiFoto Blog, and thanks for dropping in here.
In case you've been missing me the past few days, I've been putting my blogger boot camp training into action on a new blog dedicated to my personalized gift web site, FeeFiFoto.com. Visit me there at: http://feefifoto.typepad.com/feefifoto/. Eventually I'll transition to the new blog exclusively, but for now I'm maintaining two bases until I can get this place painted and on the market.
The Kinder Studio has come up with a way to flatter our kids and recognize their artistic accomplishments in a way any parent can appreciate:
"As parents, we strongly believe that children's art, however crude or fabulous, deserves appreciation. We also know how challenging it can be to show the proper respect for each and every creation while maintaining some semblance of grown-up home decor.When I bought FeeFiFoto last year I thought it would be fun to sell personalized gifts, but I never anticipated picking up anything for myself because I see my kids all the time anyway. I designed a photo calendar just to see how the site worked, and a photo handbag as a conversation starter, and discovered a warm feeling I hadn't expected from looking at things with pictures of my own kids, similar to the feeling I get when I hear the greeting my daughter recorded on our voice mail.After layers of tattered paintings and drawings threatened to take over our walls, we got the idea to turn our favorites into digital files which could then be reproduced as easy-to-frame prints."
a pastel,
or a map of the United States my son drew free hand from memory in thefourth grade. No kidding -- by the time they finish sixth grade kids at his school map the entire world from memory.
Here's one more just for fun. Can you figure out who this person is? Take a guess, and then click on her to see if you're right. Go ahead -- I'll wait.
My most unusual mementos/artworks, are each kid's first Jack O'Lantern. It might sound peculiar but actually it was ridiculously simple although, admittedly, inadvertent. After my son's first Halloween I couldn't stand throwing away that cute little pumpkin with his lopsided smile, so I popped it in the freezer and forgot about it. Nine months later I found it to be almost entirely freeze dried; I put the pumpkin in a very low oven, turned the oven off and left the pumpkin in there overnight. The next morning the little fella was dry and firm. I did the same thing for my daughter's first pumpkin, and they both occupy a place of honor in the dining room.
Setting:
Cute puppy, huh? I carry a small clutch made by FeeFiFoto that has a picture of our dog, a Tibetan Terrier
named Violet, on each side. My kids are cute too, but I hesitate to put their photos on a purse, not only for security reasons but also for reasons of practicality. First, the kids will change: teeth are lost and replaced, hair is shorter or longer, fashions evolve. Not that I carry the same handbag year after year, but if I put the kids' picture on a purse it'll obsolesce as soon as I drive it off the parking lot.
The second reason comes from pure public relations. I carry a photo handbag partly to promote FeeFiFoto, and it's astonishing how much attention this puppy purse generates. Especially when Violet's with me, people look at the purse and then at the dog and then back to the
purse and their faces light up. Seems hokey, but the joint appearance of the dog and the purse with a picture of the dog makes people smile. And somehow, no matter how cute your kids are, photos of them never seem to have the same effect. Even if the dog's not with me people still comment on the bag, and charming them is a slam dunk when I say that's not just any dog on my purse -- it's my dog.
When your business involves photographs you regularly witness astonishingly creative approaches to the same old square or rectangular format.When I had portraits taken of my kids I'd baffle the photographers by insisting on keeping the unusual photos like this one:
The woman who took this shot had her finger on delete, but I stopped her; this photo shows the essence of my son when he was six months old, with the fingers in the mouth and the little smile behind them. I once insisted on a portrait of my daughter taken from the back.
Here are some more unusual photos I found while browsing the net:
"The following shots are all of moving subjects where the photographer has made the choice to set their camera to capture the movement as blur rather than freezing it. This is in all cases by choosing (or letting the camera choose) a ’slow’ shutter speed (although by slow you’ll see that the speeds (noted under each image) vary from anything from 1/30 second to up to 40 minutes)."
Photo by Sara Heinrichs - Exposure Time: 20 seconds
Photo by Mr Bones - No exposure settings supplied
Photo by Amnemona - No exposure settings given
Photo by Ben McLeod - Shutter Speed - 8 seconds
Photo by WisDoc - Shutter Speed - 1/30
Photo by Wam Mosely - Shutter speed - 4/5 of a second
My kids are rather adventurous eaters, and who am I to deny them their favorites? Of course, one of their favorites is McDonald's and I deny that all the time, but still -- I suppose you could say I indulge them when their requests are healthy. Anyway, they're particularly fond of an Italian white bean soup they order every time we eat at a particular restaurant (they also like the chocolate shell this place puts on top of ice cream; consequently they refer to this restaurant as "Gold Brick"). The owner graciously gave me a list of ingredients but no measurements or instructions because he figured, correctly, that I'd rarely need to produce a bathtub full of soup; I knew I could figure it out.
