discovery

I am sorry I have neglected this blog for a while. I have been rather busy with other things. Then I am leaving for a week again.
I wish to make up for my negligence by sharing with you another photo that I paired with a quote. I hope you like it.

Converting a photo to a card

What I am sharing today is another photo that I converted to a card.

I took this photo early in the morning just as the sun’s rays penetrated the sky. The rays created sparkles on the raindrops on blades of grass and I thought the effect was very nice.

I found the quote from Mother Teresa scribbled in my notebook and put the two together (in photoshop).

The lowly grass reminded me that we can indeed do small things with great love and come up with a bigger, better picture of our world. Don't you agree?

prayer and rain

One time, it was only 4 days before our monthly contest and I did not yet have any decent picture for our theme “rain”. I prayed for rain that day and when it suddenly poured I was so surprised and thankful.

I prayed for rain and God gave me rain, so I knew had to go out and take a picture. With umbrella in one hand and my camera in the other, I went out into the rain and started shooting. It was hard shooting that way; I just could not get my camera steady. I needed both hands in order to do that but I also had to hold the umbrella or my camera will get wet. What a dilemma!

Anyway, I was able to get a few non-blurry shots and what I’m sharing today is one of them. I found a quotation that seems to go very with this photo, so I added it here. What do you think?

Oh, by the way, I did not submit this photo to our contest. Why? Because the printed version did look as striking as the computer screen version and I had no more time to make adjustments and get a new print. Now I'm wondering if it would have won had I submitted it. I'll never know, I guess. However, there is one thing that I know - God answers prayers!

my first OTS

I was just a month old in my club when I experienced my first OTS. I did not even know what an OTS was then, but I kind of just figured out what it means based on how everybody was talking about it. So I learned that it stands for “on the spot” shoot or painting or anything on the spot.

Anyway, my first OTS was a festival. I have heard of the festival before and I learned that one of our club members won the top prize photo of the festival the year before. Everyone was excited because we were hoping to duplicate what happened the year before. Since our club had a big delegation, we decided to break up into groups with each group having a senior member as guide. I was lucky to be assigned under the guidance of last year’s winner.

We got to the festival site early so we were able to take some shots as the participants prepared and rehearsed their numbers. I have never taken festival photos before and even if I prepared by reading on the best camera settings for shooting festivals, I still had to fiddle around with my camera buttons because there was so much movement. I also got separated from our guide and I did not have anybody to consult with. We found each other later though when it started to rain and we had to scamper for cover.

The rain poured real hard as several of us tightly squeezed together under a very small tent. We got wet anyway but we kept our cameras dry by covering them with plastic bags.

When it seemed that the rain was not going to stop for a while, some participants started getting impatient and they started dancing even in the rain. Since it was hard to keep on changing my camera settings, I just set it in burst and P mode and kept on shooting even if I could not see anything in the rain. Well, I’m glad I did that because when I later reviewed the shots I made I still came up with some good ones. And my favorite shot is the one I share today. I also discovered a very apt quotation for the photo. So here it is, it's titled "rain dance".

By the way, this photo won 2nd prize in our club photo contest for that festival. So getting wet was all worth it.