December Daily™ 2011 | Day Thirteen

Welcome to December Daily™ 2011 | Day Thirteen.

Yesterday as I was working and clicking (you know how that goes right?) I came across Max Ehrmann's Desiderata on Tara Whitney's blog. It's not the first time I've read it - I think the first time was when I was a sophomore in high school. It speaks to me each time I find it again so I decided it would be a nice thing to include in my December Daily™ for today.

I can imagine myself opening up my 2012 December Daily™ in the coming years and seeing this again and having it be just what I need to read.

It's also seemed a nice companion to a photo I took of Anna this morning. I set the camera on the ground, set it to 100 ISO and took a couple shots as she played with her Playmobil between the tree and a couch.

"Be at peace" was added directly onto the photo using American Crafts Hollyday Silver Elf Chipboard and a single line was stitched across the top.

I've seen a couple people in the comments mention the challenge of photographing in low-light. I find, at this time of year specifically with all the twinkle lights, that I actually welcome the low-light. That said, there are times when it works and times when it doesn't. I'm sure I could of adjusted this photo in Photoshop - but this is a pretty good representation of what I saw. Glowing yellow light inside, the blue of the early morning light out the window.

In this case I purposely chose a really low ISO - 100 - and set the camera on the floor so there would be no shake (I actually wanted to see how long the shutter would stay open - it wasn't as long as I thought it would be).

That said, sometimes low light is just really annoying. I googled "tips for shooting in low light" and there are 16,300,000 results. This one was pretty decent.

Along the edge I added a strip of Jillibean paper (stars), a small piece from the Jenni Bowlin paper, and a small kraft star that was cut from a Trader Joes shopping bag.

I repeated another little piece of the Trader Joe's paper on the top. Along the right edge of the first page I added some stars cut with the Silhouette. All those accents include machine stitching.

Here's a look at the pages in my album:

I saved the words as a PDF for you guys in case it means something to you right now. You can download it by clicking here. (2.3 MB)

SUPPLIES | DAY THIRTEEN

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