Let's do 52 - a photography challenge for the year

If you're a bit of a photographer/scrapbooker/memory maker yourself, you may have heard of such things as 365 Project or Project 365, where you take a photo a day and upload it to your blog, Facebook or do it just for the fun of the challenge.

Personally, I am a big fan of photography and love continuing to learn how to drive my Canon DSLR and tweak images to my liking in Photoshop, but considering that my posting frequency on this and my other blog has been struggling to reach monthly in recent times, I figured that a daily photography post fell ever so slightly on the side of over-ambitious.

Enter Annie Manning of Paint the Moon Photography - photographer extraordinaire and creator of some seriously amazing Photoshop actions.  Last year she started a project whereby, instead of daily, you take and post photos weekly - "Let's Do 52", she calls it - and it's much more my speed.

I didn't join in last year, but this year, I'm raring to go, so here we go with the first in what I plan will be a series of 52 weekly photography posts...

Each week there is a theme - a choice of two in fact - and this week there was Natural or Sharing to choose from.

This first installment features my big girl, who can frequently be found with her face in a book - be it sitting quietly or walking around the house bumping into things whilst doing so.  I figured it fit with the Natural theme, being that she is in her natural habitat :-)

I processed the above image with a Photoshop action called All Together Now from Annie's Picture Perfect Mega Set of actions.

Unintentionally, I have also sort of taken a pic using the second theme as well, in fact both of them combined even...

This was taken shortly after arriving home from VacSwim (vacation swimming lessons) so they are fresh from the post swimming shower with hair resembling birds' nests (natural?!) and each chowing down on a cheek from an enormous mango that we picked up from the new local markets by the box load (sharing?!)

I was already quite happy with the colour and light in this picture, so didn't edit it at all other than cropping it in a bit closer than the original pic.

So there you have it.  One week in to the New Year and I'm on track with my weekly challenge.  Woot!  If you want to join in, head over to Paint the Moon for all the details, to join the Flickr group and get your photography on for twenty-twelve!