Photo of the Month – Winter Storm

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Hi Folks:

At the end of the year the pull of the moon and the changing ocean currents combine to give us both winter storms and very high (and low) tides, known as King Tides. It’s a subject we’ve written about before, both in 2010 and in 2012. Every experience is different, and fortunately (unlike in 2010) I didn’t get swamped by a rogue wave this time.

The image below was made at Holland Point on December 12. The rocks that appear in the mid-frame are actually bedrock extrusions, and the one on the left stands about 12′ (~3.7m) above the surrounding seafloor. I went out at night on December 23 and not only could I walk out to this rock, I could almost walk around it. I’ve never seen the tide that low before.

Holland Point, King TidesOkay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!!

Hugs,
M&M

Happy Holidays!

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Hi Folks:

Whether you celebrate Christmas or Festivus, Solstice or Saturnalia, the arrival of Sinterklaas or Grandfather Frost, Hanukkah, Mawlid Un Nabi, Kwanzaa or something entirely personal, we send you love. Create an amazing 2016!!
2015 Christmas Card

Victoria’s Public Menorah Lighting

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Hi Folks:

The other night we were both pleased and privileged to attend Victoria’s public Menorah lighting at Centennial Square – the same place where we’d been a couple of weeks before to celebrate the annual Christmas tree lighting and Santa Claus parade.

Public Menorah Lighting

Victoria’s Public Menorah lighting (click the image to see the video)

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Photo of the Month – November

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Hi Folks:

One of the (many) benefits of living in Victoria is that we generally have flowers in bloom all 12 months of the year. A favourite thing for us to do on New Year’s Day is to go to the Lieutenant Governor’s levée (reception) and then wander the grounds, making images of the flowers (images we dutifully send back east, to remind friends and family of what is coming for them). 🙂

We’re not entirely without winter’s chill, however. Marcia made the following image of hoar frost on English ivy leaves one November morning on her commute through Beacon Hill Park.

Hoar Frost

Okay, that’s it! Go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,
M&M

“You Are Beautiful”

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Hi Folks:

This is well worth sharing. Shea Glover, a student at The Chicago High School for the Arts, conducted a social experiment where she asked her fellow classmates and teachers if she could make photographs of them. What they didn’t know was that rather than shooting still images, she was recording their reactions to when she told them she was photographing people she found beautiful. The video is less than five minutes long, and worth it!

And remember, you are. Beautiful, that is.

Hugs,
M&M

Lightroom 1.4 for Android

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Hi Folks:

When Lightroom Mobile (Apple only) was first introduced you needed a CC subscription to use it. Adobe eventually introduced Lr for Android, and with Lr Mobile 2.0 for iOS in October they dropped the requirement that you have a subscription. Lr 1.4 for Android was introduced today and it also has the same lifted restriction. If you have a CC account you can link your device and your Lr catalogue on your computer, but it’s not necessary.

Lr for Android 1.4 is available for free from the Google Play store so I downloaded it and tried it out. Continue Reading →

2016 Photo Calendars

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Hi Folks:

This is the sixth year now that we’ve made our MS Word photo calendar templates available, and as with the past couple of years, we’ve also created a series of templates and calendar images you can use with Lightroom or other graphics software. This year we’ve also added one more option, which we’ll get to below. I created a template in MS Word that allows people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars, so we’ll cover that first; the Lightroom stuff is below that. I used MS Word 2007 to make the template, but saved it as both a Word 2007 file and a Word 97-2003 compatible file. Basically it’s a series of tables, one for each month, that look something like this:

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The Thanksgiving Reader

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Hi Folks:

This Thursday is Thanksgiving Day for our neighbours to the south, but every day is a good day to live with gratitude. Since Thanksgiving is about more than eating turkey (or tofurky for those vegetarian types) Seth Godin has made the following Thanksgiving Reader available to everyone. For free. Click on the image below to go to his Thanksgiving Reader page, and you can download the .pdf from there (but be sure to read the entire page 😉 ).

And to Seth, thanks for providing this for all of us!

Hugs,
M&M

The Thanksgiving Reader

It’s Our Birthday!!

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Hi Folks: Well, it’s been six years since our son Nick first helped us get M&M’s Musings onto the world stage… something for which we are (almost always) grateful! In these past 6 years we’ve posted 469 blog posts and 138 pages (mostly our short stories) on a variety of topics. According to Google Analytics we’ve had 122,253 views over 87,358 sessions, with people from 180 countries coming to visit our little corner of the ‘net. To us that’s simply amazing. But enough about us!

In those six years we’ve traveled some, grown lots and changed quite a bit, and so has our blog. We’ll continue to share with you thoughts and ideas that are important to us, and trust that you continue to find some interest here too. The real reason for this post is for us to say thanks to you, our readers. Thanks for showing up, thanks for reading our (often very long) posts, and thanks for sharing your thoughts and comments with us!! Here’s to our continuing journey!!

As Marcia says, Love and Laughter!! Party on!!

Hugs,
M&M

Canada Day Fireworks