Brownies and Ice Cream

Ever since I started taking pictures earlier this year I have completely fallen in love with photography!  I think it's funny that it took me until my mid 40's to find something besides my family and pets to be so passionate about.  Better late than never I suppose!

In all honesty, I don't think I could have been a photographer prior to the digital age.  I would have been too impatient to see the results, and too frustrated that I had destroyed a whole role of film by using the wrong settings.  The beauty of using digital is that you can take lots of pictures for free and play around with the manual settings as much as you like until you learn what works and what doesn't.   Plus you get almost instant feedback on what works and what doesn't...I love that!

My hat is off to the Ansel Adams of the world who could do this long before digital cameras existed!

 (check out the view in the viewfinder on this one, it was completely accidental)

If you've been reading my blog for awhile, then you know that we've begun the painstaking process of selling my childhood home. 

My mother was an only child so she inherited a large amount of "stuff" over the years, plus my parents acquired even more stuff in their 50+ years of marriage.


 

Lucky for me, one of the things they had never thrown out were old cameras.  When we went through the attic there were several old cameras that called to me.  None of them are particularly valuable, and thankfully no one else wanted them, but because of my new found love, I just had to have them!

Sarah, from the wonderful blog A Beach Cottage, has a passion for vintage, well loved cameras too, and had done several posts on using her new camera to shoot through the lens of these old beauties.

I had Mr. Tide hold this old Kodak camera as I shot a picture of the brightly colored maple tree in our yard.  I love how the scene becomes reversed or upside down sometimes in these old viewfinders!

I have no idea who these belonged to, except for the Argus, which was my parent's camera.

But I love imagining where these cameras have been and what wonderful bits of history they recorded for someone in my family.  Just think if they could talk...I wonder what tales they would tell of  war, or foreign lands, and family gatherings?

Shooting through the viewfinder on the Brownie I captured this pint of Breyer's Ice Cream...you can't have a brownie without ice cream right?!  Is a pint really a good size for ice cream?   I think not!

Here is the Argus.  I'm pretty sure this one produced a few embarrassing photos of myself when I was very little!

My father was the official family photographer.  He had a wonderful knack for snapping photos of you looking like a puffer fish as you blew out the candles on your birthday cake each year. 

My mother was particularly fond of the photos he took after she had stayed up all night being Santa, or the Easter Bunny.  There all 4 of us kids were lined up looking bright, happy, and perfectly dressed, while my mother was still in her nightgown, or a slip waiting to finally get herself pulled together for the day!

Although I know photography would not have been for me when film was your only option, I still love the way these cameras look and feel.  All the fancy dials and knobs must have been the height of technology in their day.

And on the old ones, I love the simplicity of it all.  How wonderful and exciting it must have been when cameras became available and easy to use for the general public.

The Argus was the most difficult to shoot through the lens with my own camera.  See that tiny speck in the middle of the photo of our table and umbrella?

Even though the photo isn't great, I still love the way that tiny spot of table looks...so 50's/60's with the colors and the haziness.  All those things we now try and recapture with our fancy textures and actions!  Our grandparents and great grandparents would get a kick out of that I'm sure!

And here is that same scene just shot with my Canon Rebel.  Amazing how far we've come isn't it?!  My great grandfather on my mother's side was a professional photographer, and actually met my great grandmother when he came to take her picture.  Maybe that's where my love of photography stems from...

And to answer Jo's question about how I downloaded and installed all of my new actions onto PS Elements 9, I simply followed the step by step instructions that came with my Flora Bella textures and Actions.  They came as part of the download so you have to open them up and read the file.

For the Pioneer Woman actions, I simply clicked on the actions on her download page (HERE), and then followed the link to the Texas Chicks website where they give you step by step instructions on how to install them, click HERE to read those instructions.   

NOTE:  

The Flora Bella Actions installation differs from the instructions for installing Pioneer Woman's actions, and be sure to "unzip" the files after you download them.

I use a PC so the install for a Mac will differ as well.  And there is also an updated version for installing PW Actions which I've linked HERE.

I hope you each have a happy Wednesday!