October Monthly Special

Takeout Photo's October Monthly Special is about telling stories through photos. This is the story of last week!

May monthly special: color

The Take-Out Photo monthly special for May is about color. I was excited when I took this photo in the Cos-Bar in Vail, and then less so when I looked at it. But whatever, I'm posting it anyway just to be supportive of Marc. I guess maybe I should go out on a special shoot looking for color, like Max did!

March Monthly Special: Foreground

The Take-out Photo monthly special for March is all about foreground. I'm having a busy month and haven't shot anything new specifically for the challenge, but I knew I had this picture that I took in the summertime that would fit the bill. Apparently, I just love photos with something in focus in the foreground and a blurry background...

February monthly special

The Take-Out Photo monthly special for February is about backgrounds. I spotted a restaurant behind our local D.I. recently and knew I wanted to take pictures in front of its red walls. I'll be returning to do more another time!

January monthly special

Marc's January monthly special at Take-Out Photo is all about black and white conversion. This is something I've been wanting to learn about, and it was fun to play with.

I took a couple of photos of this old (and, I assume, abandoned) barn near Jill's house when I was taking Lucas and Landon to her house last Saturday.

First, I did the channel mixing as per the instructions in the monthly special post. Then, I did the split grading tutorial from a subsequent post. This is definitely something I will use in the future!

November monthly special

Take-out Photo's November monthly special is Still Life: A few of my favorite things.

It doesn't involve any Photoshop, so the only challenge is figuring out which favorite things to photograph. It took a bit of narrowing, but I had to go with:

letters and words.

There's not much I love more than letters and words, in all their forms: monograms, books, abécédaires, correspondence, typography, and yes -- even Boggle. They make me oh so happy.

What are a few of your favorite things?

October monthly special

Today I finally got a chance to work on the Take-Out Photo October monthly special!

Marc took the pictures of the kids in their Halloween costumes last year, which pretty much makes the whole thing. Still, I'm happy with the result.

It was fun, and now that I have a dot template, I think I'll do another!

September Monthly Special

The Take-Out Photo challenge for September is very broad: combining text with photos. I was inspired by Max's cool photo to do a recipe:


I made the peach sauce yesterday morning and took a photo before Jill and I ate our dessert. I have literally been waiting since January to make this! I love it.

How cool would it be to hand out recipe cards like this?

August monthly special

Take-Out Photo's August monthly special has a photo-within-a-photo theme. Once again, I was fairly intimidated by the examples I saw. But once again, in trying to be supportive of Marc, I'm posting an effort, even though I don't think I managed to take a great photo (believe it or not, there were several attempts).


This is an example of a photo being used in my home -- it's a photo of my mother, taken when she was around one year old. I'm not even sure how it came to be in my possession, but I sure am glad it did! I love everything about this photo, from the curly hair to the pensive look to the peter pan collar. I even reproduced it as a pencil drawing in one of my high school art classes, though I'm sure I don't have the skills to do that anymore.

It sits in one of the teacups in my chemistry cupboard-turned-china cabinet that Marc made for me. I love the way it matches my black and white toile dishes (given to me by my mother). I love its vintage look, and its sentimental value. I just love everything about it!

July monthly special

We're back! I'm tired, I have mountains of laundry, and I have to get ready for Girls' Camp... I have hundreds of pictures from our trip and I'm frankly overwhelmed about posting it. So for now, I'm posting a photo for the Take-Out Photo July challenge: architectural detail.

I took this yesterday outside of a truly nasty diner where we stopped for lunch. Its only redeeming quality was that it provided a few good photos (well, and Max's milkshake was tasty). I did love the red window frames, and I'm a sucker for glass block.

Back soon (I hope) with more trip details!

June monthly special

I did Marc's challenge for June on Take-out Photo. These are some of my favorite photos from our trip to Charleston in 2006. I wanted to use more than 9 photos, so I went to a 12x12 canvas. I couldn't get the spacing to work out perfectly, so I have a slightly larger outside margin on the left side and on the bottom. Not ideal, but...

... I'm still happy with the results. If I print it out, I will probably trim the excess to make it an even 1/4" around all sides.

It was fun! I have some more ideas, so I may play around with this some more.