Long Summer Days

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Welcome

JUNE

My Spring Colours

Bringing my garden's colours inside.

Spring took it's time to come and soon those beautiful white flowers will be replaced with red berries (poisonous, so I've heard), so I decided to capture these colours while I could.

Have a lazy Sunday everyone!

Winter

It's snowing again...

Seems like the winter doesn't want to end.

image via Søciety6

photo by me

Have a nice weekend everyone! I'm having a cold one...

December Snow

And on the first day of December it snowed...

First frost

We are getting some cold winds from the north, and this is what happens.

Have a great weekend, I'll be having a cold one!

By The Stream

rusty details...

Time and winter do some damage...but I do love a bit of rust, it looks pretty!

My city in yellow

Inspirational...

I'm an amateur. I fell in love with photo styling after deciding to start this blog. Searching through the internet, finding many beautiful blogs, discovering the work of talented stylists and photographers...and looking at many, many, many wonderful pictures. I try to learn by studying other people's work and by practising as much as I can. Everyday, when I'm photographing or preparing a post, I'm second doubting myself and thinking that maybe I shouldn't venture into such a unknown territory. And then, this morning, I get an e-mail from my aunt Carmo where, roughly translated, she says:

"Continue to photograph, photograph all you like, many books, tidy books, untidy books, pages, paragraphs,sentences that you like, photograph stones, running water and stagnant water, river water, and  pond water, petals and leaves, dog paws, cat paws, rabbit snout, lamb snout, Clic ClicClic! Do not stop! When you think there is no more to photograph start writing. Write by hand, in a machine, the keyboard, on a notebook, the exercise book, on the greasy napkin, in a pack of sugar everywhere."

And then I felt good and relaxed about photography and styling. Because after learning how to do that I still need to learn how to write... haha!

Red Mailboxes

A woman is sitting on a bench at the city square. She   has a cigarette in one hand, an her cell phone in the other. She´s sending a text message. The mail boxes are red, with shame. 

My "Instas"

I´ve been seeing many posts and a lot of fuss about this INSTAGRAM thing lately. I went and did some research about it and decided to share it here. So, according to Wikipedia, it is an Apple application that, in a very easy and very simple way, allows you to apply filters to your photos, making them look all retro and vintage (quite In at the moment), and then share them in several social networks. But apparently it has become a phenomenon. Like the Polaroid or the Lomo combined with Twitter or Facebook. 

If you feel curious about it and you have an Iphone you can check out this blog with really good tips about how to create your Instagrams. If, like me, the only thing you ever asked from your phone was to make and receive calls and text messages, then you can go the hard way and still get nice results... only with a lot bit more work involved. In any case you can make really, really bad pictures look pretty awesome. And THAT is what got me really interested in this, hmm, trend. 

Let's face it, it's not always handy to carry my camera with me unless I´m going out on purpose on a "photographic expedition". And sometimes if I want to take a picture I want to take it right then. So I had been trying to take pictures with my poor excuse of a phone, cause that one is always with me no matter what. And, of course, the pictures were always very bad. But look at the example below: a crappy picture, cropped into a square (it seems that the magic only works if it is a square), an aging filter, and a black-burnished border.

The following pictures weren´t all taken with my phone, but I had lots of fun watching these results appear. To do this I used Photobucket and you can see some of my other "Instas" there. It may not be as quick to use as an app in your phone, but it´s not difficult at all, it just takes a bit more time. And if you like the results it´s well worth it.

Little squares of photographic deliciousness when they come all together like this.

Peanut

I know I am too old for these things, but I´d never had snow right outside my door until last February, and at that time I was a bit "afraid" of all this cold, white stuff. So today, a typical lazy Sunday with nothing urgent to do, I decided to give it a try and build my first snowman. I had no clue on how to even start but my boyfriend agreed to endure the cold and take pictures while yelling me instructions on how to make a simple snow ball. Truth be told, after rolling and rolling, and rolling a bit more, I got so warm that the negative temperatures didn´t affect me any more. As it was my first project of a snow man I kept it simple and small... but isn´t it cute?! I call him peanut: small, roundish and cute.

I´ve been playing around with Olioboard lately, which is an easy on line tool to create moodboards, and decided to create my "Making a Snowman" moodboard. 

Snow (can´t skip this step),

Nothing to do,

Warm boots, warm gloves and a warm jacket,

Warm coffee waiting inside

Equip warm clothes, go outside and build your snowman, take pictures, run inside and drink your coffee while looking at the snowman through the window and declare that it is the cutest you´ve ever seen.

Snow

I came back from a short vacation on Madeira island and this is what I find...

Gorgeous but bloody cold!

Need to work on a strategy to take pictures without freezing my fingers up to a point of excruciating pain though.

Visiting Home

Back to Funchal in Madeira island for a week. 

Nothing says "home" better than sitting in a café in the middle of the afternoon to have an espresso.

A mandatory visit to the Market to show my danish boyfriend the colours and smells of my island.

And a walk through the "zona velha". An old part of the city.