General Guidelines for Girls and Lipstick

When you choose a lipstick shade, make it one or two shades more intense than your natural lip color. Or, for a more dramatic look, choose a brighter color.

If you aren't used to wearing makeup, get some help from your best friend. She will give you an honest opinion of how it looks.

Be aware that you may have admirers, and you should treat them with kindness. After all, your beauty is irresistible!

If you are having someone paint your nails, it is a good idea to have something good to read while you wait.

Your smile will always be your best beauty accessory.

Single shot on Saturday: tableau

My gardening husband came in with this bunch of hydrangeas this afternoon, and it begged for a fuchsia vase. Something about this unlikely pairing with the shells and the bowl of garlic is so pleasing for me. How I love little treasures put together in a corner of the house...

Photo Tag--Yea! I'm It!

Lovely and wise Julianne at Potpourripromenade has tagged me with a game. Here's how you play: Show the fourth photo in the fourth folder in your photo files. Then tag four more.

Here is mine:



In this photo, Esme is celebrating her first birthday, and she's busy choosing a toothbrush from the Tol table. The Tol ceremony is a Korean tradition for babies on their first birthday. In Korea, babies are dressed in the hanbok, and there are tables groaning with amazing ceremonial foods for celebrating. The Tol table is laid out with items that symbolize different professions or blessings for a person's life. A few items on the traditional table are:

• bow and arrow: the child will become a warrior
  
• needle and thread: the child will live long
  
• jujube: the child will have many descendants
  
• book, pencil, or related items: the child will become a successful scholar
  
• rice or rice cake: the child will become rich (some resources say choosing a rice cake means the child is not smart)
  
• ruler, needle, scissors: the child will be talented with his/her hands
  
• knife: the child will be a good cook
  

The child is seated on a cushion in front of all of these items, and the first two things he or she chooses are supposed to predict the direction of his or her career or life. 

We are not Korean by culture or birth, but when we adopted Ada from Korea, we decided to incorporate many Korean traditions into our family celebrations.    Not being raised with these traditions makes it difficult to to it entirely authentically, obviously.  But it also affords us some flexibility.  For instance, at Ada's tol party, we added a few extras to the tol table, including a thermometer (for a doctor).   Ada, being herself, first chose the thermometer and then the needle and thread.   On the video of this event, you can hear me lapse into a throaty cheer, not unlike a good Yiddish mama, "She's a doctor!  And she has long life!  Yea baby!"  I guess I channeled Barbra Streisand for a minute or something.

For Esme's tol table, we added yet another few choices:  a small plane (pilot) and a toothbrush (dentist).  She chose the toothbrush first, and then a measuring cup (a chef, perhaps?).   Ada likes to remind Esme that she's "going to be a dentist who likes to cook."   Time will tell.   She does like to brush her teeth and floss an awful lot, come to think of it....

Now to tag four more:

3continentfamily

American Koukla

Word Lovers Unite

and I know she's been tagged already, but I second it:

La Belette Rouge

Tag, you're all it!

Hearts in the snow

On my way downstairs yesterday morning, I caught a glimpse of something unusual in the driveway.



I have love and hearts on my mind lately, and not just because of the upcoming Valentine's Day. I love how our minds manifest things--perception is everything. Yesterday the world offered me hearts entwined, and I accepted them!

On this day, I give you a poem of connection--like these hearts, like my love and I, like the world and all of us...

You Are Me

You are me and I am you. 

It is obvious that we are inter-are. 

You cultivate the flower in 

yourself so that I will be beautiful. 

I transform the garbage in myself so 

that you do not have to suffer. 

I support you you support me. 

I am here to bring you peace 

you are here to bring me joy.

- Thich Naht Hahn

Bokeh, baby

I'm not really a gadget person--I have a pay-by-the-minute cell phone, and that says it all. But I do love, LOVE my camera, which is a Canon Digital Rebel xti. I am the farthest thing from even a hobbyist as a photographer, but I take so many photos I think I will burn out my hard drive. The digital camera just begs to take shot after indiscriminate shot, and so our photo file has almost 8000 photos, lots of which I could discard, but haven't.

All of that aside, many of photos I take are just experiments with composition or light or subject, whatever. Here is my latest experiment, and I thought I'd share it with you.

Bokeh is the light effect of blurred little hearts that you see in this photo of Ada.  Bokeh is not really the blur, but describes the character of the blurred elements behind the object in focus. There are many great websites that talk about the nuances of bokeh, including this one by Ken Rockwell.  Bokeh can be the way the points of unfocused light blur naturally, or you can make your own bokeh lens hood to create different shapes with the light.  I used hearts, but you could come up with whatever you like.

I love the way you can create bokeh with Christmas lights in the background, and so I tried to make a few shots myself, using my little handmade bokeh lens hood. I learned how from this site on DIY photography.

Here is my lens:

As you can see, it is the sloppiest handmade thing ever.  I used dark paper, some scotch tape, and I cut the heart out with a scissors.   I traced the circular lens and cut a circle from the dark paper.  I cut a strip to go around the lens.  Then I cut a heart in the center of the paper circle.  I taped it all up.  Then I slipped it over my camera's lens.  Making this took me all of 2 minutes, obviously.  

To my credit, I made a neater second one with a cute little Martha Stewart heart-punch, but it was too small, and didn't let enough light in to get a real focused shot.   My first slop-job did the trick with the light, and so it was good enough.

The lens I used is the one I use most: A Canon 50mm 1:1.4. It takes some really nice pictures in low light. I almost always hate a flash, and this lets me do what I want without one, for the most part.


To get the photos, I had to get the blur, or bokeh, far enough into the background, so by trial and error I found that Ada had to move some distance (maybe 5 feet) from the tree to be the object of the focus. Then the background of the lights naturally fell out of focus, and caught the light in the shape of the lens hood hole.


Here are a few more shots I got later at night. This time I had problems getting a good image of the object in front of me, probably because I wouldn't turn on lights. 

And because our tabby kitty kept moving toward the lens to be petted. But I do like these hearts floating behind her silhouette, and while I'm sure I'm alone in this, I love this softy shot of our favorite quilt on my knee. 

If you still have your Christmas or Hanukah lights up, you should make a little bokeh experiment for yourself. Very fun, very cheap, and only takes a few minutes.

Photo hunt Saturday: Reflection

I don't know the exact rules for the photo hunt over at tnchick, but I'm playing along this week because I loved the theme: Reflection.    Here is fairy Esme, admiring her year-old self as she tries out her wings.  I love how her hand trails dreamily along the glass...

Spider's eye view

My husband is a man of many talents, and one of them is taking photos. This spider caught his eye recently. Here she is in her house outside our front door.


A shift in focus, and here is how the spider sees our house.


I love her beautiful colors--so reminiscent of the fall to come. Happy autumn.