Writing Exercise

DAY 54

23 FEB 09

My son is learning to write in school. Not penmanship, but writing stories. Structure. And my son, he ain't getting it.

He came home from school with a page filled with sentences. On that page was a sticky note saying he needed to rewrite the paper. In paragraphs. So my son dutifully sat down and did the work. And came back with a page filled with nothing but paragraphs. Each sentence was its own paragraph.

Now, I'm all for frequent paragraphing; it can have quite an impact. But that was overdone, even for me. It quickly became clear to me that the poor little guy had no idea of the purpose for paragraphs. I came up with a way to help him understand.

We scribbled each sentence onto a piece of paper, then cut them apart so that each sentence was its own slip of paper. Then I had him separate the slips of paper into groups. Why dogs are good to have around was one group. How to care for a dog was another. From those piles, he was able to write his paper. With paragraphs. And I was able to comfortably say he did all the work.

This photo is some of those slips of paper lined up on my dining room table, waiting to be written into paragraphs. The sunlight was coming in through the blinds, and I thought it made an interesting scene.

Post processing was simple: noise reduction, sharpening, curves adjustment, black and white conversion using Photoshop's black and white adjustment with the maximum black setting, and a border addition.

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EDITED March 4, 2009 5:53 pm to include the color version below for comparison's sake, without borders as requested by an anonymous commenter:

Welcome Back, George!

DAY 51

20 FEB 09

Day 51 was the first day I did actual writing again. I'd put it aside for a while so I could concentrate on other pursuits, but it was time to work it back in to my daily activities. After I finished the read through of my unfinished NaNoWriMo 2008 project, Chester and Rube, my Alphasmart 3000 came out of his hidey hole and got some use again.

George, as my Alphasmart 3K is affectionately known, has become my favorite way to write. When I bought him, I'd been lusting after the Alphasmart Neo, but unable to fully justify spending the bucks. What if I bought it and ended up not using it much? That would be money wasted -- money that could have been better spent elsewhere. So I trolled eBay for the older version, the 3000.

Best $80 I ever spent.

If you're a writer who's been contemplating one of these babies, I recommend them wholeheartedly. George is much much lighter than my laptop, and therefore easier to haul around. He runs forever on a couple AA batteries (I've had him since August and haven't changed batteries yet). Plus, George has the added bonus of not having any of the distractions I get whenever I use my laptop (named Frankie). No email. No games. Just writing.

I love George.

Post processing was my usual: noise reduction, sharpening, a mild curves adjustment, and the border addition.

The Read Through

DAY 48

17 FEB 09

Day 48 was the day I'd declared I would begin to re-introduce writing to my daily routines. Since I was working on a story I'd already started, my first step was to print what I had and read it through, catching myself up.

The story is Chester and Rube, a kind of fractured adventure featuring an innocent white duck with green pointy ears and his newfound giant purple dinosaur friend, Rube, and their quest to save their home forest from the evil Centipig. I'd started it for NaNoWriMo 2008, and it's now time to finish it.

Post-processing included conversion to black & white, noise reduction, sharpening, a curves adjustment, and the Still Life 3 filter from Virtual Photographer.

Sweet Music

DAY 16

16 JAN 09

Since the kids have a four-day weekend this week (Presidents' Day weekend), I had the opportunity to accompany my husband to his studio for his regular Friday recording sessions. Knowing they'd also been doing a lot of construction down there, I took my cameras along to get what I knew would be great shots.

While my husband was working in the back warehouse portion of the building, there were a couple musicians songwriting up front. Actually, they were in the early stages -- more idea lobbing than writing. They were brainstorming ideas. And man, was it entertaining! I told them more than once I had brought the wrong camera. I should have had my video camera with me. But I did have my still camera, and Jeff and Bradly turned out to be more interesting subjects than the construction was (although I got shots of that, too).

Meet Bradly. I took a bunch of pictures of him while he played, some incorporating depth of field and selective focusing as in the shot above, others using motion blur to try and show just how dynamic the process was. In the end, I had so many shots to choose from, it was extremely difficult. This particular shot just spoke to me, and it did so the moment I captured it. Something told me this would be my shot for the day.

Post-processing includes noise reduction and sharpening, and I applied some additional lens blur to the ugly background. Borders were also added.