Photo-a-Day – January 2016

Hello lovely Buttoneers! Instead of my usual ‘Around Here’ post this month I am mixing it up a bit! Hooray! If you are a long term Buttoneer from right near the start (100 button points to Gryffindor to you beauties!) then you may remember that I took part in Fat Mum Slim’s Photo-a-Day Challenge for a whole year.

I loved how I could have 365 (366 this year!) guaranteed photographs of everyday life, snippets of work, play, or photographs of around where or what I was up to in that moment…

…they were all attached to a daily prompt that would inspire my photo-taking senses (They are like Spidey Senses but a lot more flashy…geddit!? Flashy…camera…oh never mind).

I loved it…until it got too much. I got to a point in February last year where I had just embarked in my epic goal of the ‘Create 28 Blog Challenge’ and it all got a bit too much pressure to keep up with, so I swapped it for a more relaxed ’round-up of my month’ post. I was struggling to keep up with the prompts every day, I would hate it when I got behind and I generally started to feel uninspired about the whole process.

Fast forward to now. I made the decision (along with threats from my family and friends) to not embark on an epic  stupidly hard blog challenge (read all about it here) and without it, I found myself in a bit of a slump and a case of the ‘January’s’ (read here). Last year I was also putting a lot of pressure on myself to keep up with a regular Instagram posting schedule frenzy.

As most of you probably know – Lots of Mental Pressure = A Creative Black Hole. Fun Fun!

Well, If you follow me on Instagram (grab yourself another 50 button points as you pass go) you will know that I decided to jump back on the photographic challenge train this month! Toot! Toot! 

So, in a nutshell, to keep my Instagram regularly updated with pretty, inspiring or just plain lovely photographs, I thought I would head back to a Photo-a-Day challenge to rejuvenate my creative juices, challenge my creativity and get back on the photography train on its way to Happy Land. Phew! (Seriously, if you have stuck with this post this far – another 100 button points to Gryffindor – go you!) 

I don’t know if I will do a whole year yet, I am going to take that pressure off, but so far, I am thoroughly enjoying the challenge again.

I love that I am documenting my everyday surroundings without all of the nasty, icky pressure thus opening up new blossoms of creativity flowers. Hurrah!

So…Without further ado…here is my Photo-a-Day – January 2016…

Day 1 – Black and White – Seeing in the New Year in our pyjamas with our cups of tea watching the fireworks in London on the telly – Perfection!

Day 2 – ‘What I Did Today’ – IKEA! Hello old friend…We’re home!

Day 3 – ‘Water’ – Tiny little water droplets on my pretty little primroses! Is it me or has Spring come way too early!? 🌼💦

Day 4 – ‘Circle’ – Lots of 3D circles on the pavement in Bristol whilst sale shopping! I always fall in love with the blue tiles in the floor here 💙

Photo-a-Day – February 2015

Hello there lovely Buttoneers! I am back from my teeny blogging break and I would like to say I a bright eyed and bushy tailed and full of beans but I am tired! Does anyone ever not feel tired!? As promised I am back with my photo-a-day round up for February which means two things. Firstly that I have completed 12 months of the Photo-a-Day challenge! A whole year! 365 guaranteed photographs of everyday life attached to a daily prompt. Wowee! That’s a lot! *Pats self on back* 

Secondly, it also means that I am done with the photo-a-day challenge for a while. I know…I know…It is only one photo each day and it’s done. But at the moment it feels like so much more than that. If you have missed my previous Photo-a-Day post you can catch up here. I will explain more later in this post but for now, take in all of the colour, all of the pieces of my every day, join me in remembering February 2015… 

Photo-a-Day – January 2015

Hello there Buttoneers! I can’t believe this is the first photo-a-day round up of 2015 already! Where the heck did January go!? Fat Mum Slim’s photo-a-day challenge has changed this year to a week by week format. This just means that we are given the photo prompts on a weekly basis instead of a monthly one.

This is all that has changed yet it has made a huge difference.

I personally liked to plan ahead and I guess you could say, cheat a little with the month’s prompts. If I was out an about and saw something that fitted a prompt for the following week I would save it up and sigh with relief when I didn’t have to panic on the day. Now I have to be a bit more ‘in the same week’ spontaneous with my photos which I am yet to decide whether I like or not. The only few downfalls I have really found is that;

1. I am a super organised creative being and waiting for the next weeks prompt list (and having to hunt it down a few days before the next week rather than having it in front of me) gets me a little stressed and adds another step to my process. So okay this isn’t the end of the world.

2. Because the prompts are written in weeks now, the first prompt of February is on the end of the last week in January. This. Stresses. Me. Out.

I know it is ridiculous but there is a certain little part of my brain that is deep in love with order and deadlines and starting each month with a new perspective, a clean slate, letting go of the month before.

Okay…so these are very small problems in the grand scheme of things and the fact that I still love taking part in the photo-a-day challenge is obviously a sign that I can get over these really insignificant problems. On the up side I find that I am less pessimistic about the month’s prompts as I can’t look across them and pick out the ones I am less eager to tackle. I am also happy to find a fresh new list each week in a pretty design that I can stare at for that week until a creative idea pops into my head. 

If you are new to my little part of the internet full of crafty goodness you can find my past Photo-a-Day round ups here

All in all, it’s not a big deal. Things change, you get used to them. It would have been a whole lot more different if it had stopped all together. So, with all of that summed up…

Here is my January 2015 Photo-a-Day…

Photo-a-Day – December 2014

Hello there my lovely Buttoneers! If you didn’t catch my last post on New Year’s Eve then a massive Happy New Year! I can’t believe we are full swing into Two Thousand and Fifteen! Crazy pants! 

Anyhoo, today I wanted to be out with the old and in with the new and share my photo-a-day round-up for the last month in 2014 – December. You can find my other Photo-a-Day round-ups here.

It was a crazy year for me and December was the busiest by far. I explain all in my Merry Christmas post. I was so worried that I would be flying around trying to get everything done before Christmas, at home and on the blog, that I wouldn’t have time to document it all. But, alas! Photo-a-Day saved the day again and by taking a moment of my time to snap a quick photograph for each prompt I was able to capture the magic and chaos of my December.  

I just love that even in the depths of a hectic and stressful month; I was able to take a moment each day to recognise the beauty around me that ordinarily I would have missed. 

Here is my December 2014…

Photo-a-Day – September 2014

Hello my lovely Buttoneers! I can’t believe how fast this last month has gone and here we are at my September Photo-a-Day round-up! If you are a newbie Buttoneer, grab a cup of tea and catch up with my previous Photo-a-Day blog posts. 

If you have been following me on Instagram or maybe even Twitter, then you may have seen that I have been taking part in Fat Mum Slim’s Photo-a-day Challenge.

September’s Photo-a-Day prompts were slightly different as they were all suggested by people who play along with the monthly prompts. I found that this made them a bit more challenging and fun. I think this is because they were generally totally different to previous prompts rather than a variation. I went into the months photos with an open mind and found I enjoyed the prompts a lot more than when I get stressed about keeping up. 

Most of my September photographs reflected where I was located at that time. Whether it was in the studio at the start of the month, to watching the Tour of Britain cycle race whizz through my hometown, to the first little signs of autumn, to my break away to The Great British Seaside and rounding off the month back at home. I feel like the month came around full circle!

I know I say it every month but, I am love that each month I can document my life and the world around me through a simple photo prompt each day.

Something that takes a few minutes each day leaves me with a month of memories at the end…

Here is my September 2014 in a Photo-a-Day…

Photo-a-Day August 2014

Hello there my lovely Buttoneers! I am back and the ceiling in the studio has been replaced so now I am unpacking and figuring it all out all over again! If you missed this post you can read about it in ‘The Start of Something New’.  I wanted to pop in today with my Photo-a-Day round-up for August as it was slightly different this time around. 

If you have been following me on Instagram or maybe even Twitter, then you may have seen that I have been taking part in Fat Mum Slim’s Photo-a-day Challenge.

You can view my past Photo-a-Day round-up posts by ‘choosing a button’ on the right hand side of the blog 🙂

August was a weird month around here. It was full of stops and starts, of packing up boxes of crafts supplies again, of having to be out of the house for builders, yadda yadda yadda (I am sure you are sick of hearing about it by now!) But this meant that my usually enjoyable Photo-a-Day challenge was all over the place with my mind being elsewhere. I had to think on-the-go and spontaneously without having familiar props or crafty bits to help me. At the time I felt like I was skimming through the prompts quickly to get them done until the next day where the process would happen again and again until the end of the month. This in some case was true. However, I look back over this last month and not only can I tell you where I was for each prompt but I feel like they all document a whole month of upheaval that I wouldn’t ordinarily of been able to document.

This is exactly why I love participating in the Photo-a-Day challenges. I love that whatever is going on in my life or with my little creative biz, I will have a record of it all.

I went through the photos yesterday and was totally surprised at the amount of them I loved. I was surprised at how many I had ‘thought outside of the box’ for. I was surprised at the way I had composed some of the photographs that I can link to tough days or days out of the studio.

Sometimes life can take you by surprise…

Here is my August 2014 in a Photo-a-Day…

 

Photo-a-Day – July 2014

Hello there Buttoneers! If you have been following me on Instagram or maybe even Twitter, then you may have seen that I have been taking part in Fat Mum Slim’s Photo-a-day Challenge.

You can view my past Photo-a-Day round-up posts by ‘choosing a button’ on the right hand side of the blog 🙂

I look back over this month’s photographs and I really love them. However, this month I nearly made the decision to have a break from the challenge for a while as I was feeling uninspired by the prompts each day and found I struggled more with creative ideas for them. As I look back over them though, I am happily surprised at how much I achieved with each photo, whether it was battling through a tough prompt until I got it just right (You guys know how much of a perfectionist I am!) to pure panic that I was going to miss one and have to catch up (this happened twice much to my panic!) but either way…

…I am proud of myself for persevering, for working through the ‘blank canvas’, continuing to work on my photography and keeping those creative juices flowing each and every day by some days, pushing myself out of my comfort zone.

Here is my June 2014 in a Photo-a-Day…

Photo-a-Day June 2014

Hello there Buttoneers! If you have been following me on Instagram or maybe even Twitter, then you may have seen that for the third time this year I have been taking part in Fat Mum Slim’s Photo-a-day Challenge. 

Here are my Photo a Day – March 2014, Photo a Day April 2014 and Photo-a-Day – May 2014 blog posts. 

I am really glad I started this photo challenge. I struggled through a fair few of them this month but I am super glad I stuck with it as looking back over the months round-up I feel like I have documented the month really well. As most of you know we moved house right bang in the middle of this month, the day after my birthday and a week before I opened the Eliston Button Etsy shop for the first time. This meant I have been super busy, pretty exhausted whilst trying to make a home, unpack boxes, build a lot of flat-pack furniture, photograph stock, write product descriptions and not get much sleep! Its been a little crazy but by taking that one photograph a day for each prompt, I have managed to document it all ten times better than I would have without the challenge. My future self will be grateful of this. 

I did have to make myself do some of them and really had to simplify the prompt into its most basic and ‘clutched at straws’ form! Some of them were very open to your own interpretation and, purely because I was so busy, I wanted someone to tell me what to take a photograph of! haha! I got there in the end! 

This challenge is really opening me up to not only think creativity in a different medium (photography) than I am used to (beyond by holiday snaps and blog photographs) but how I now think about composition and what those prompts mean to me.

Here is my June 2014 in a Photo-a-Day…

Photo a Day – May 2014

Hello there Buttoneers! If you have been following me on Instagram or maybe even Twitter, then you may have seen that for the third time this year I have been taking part in Fat Mum Slim’s Photo-a-day Challenge. 

Here are my Photo a Day – March 2014 and Photo a Day April 2014 blog posts.

I am still really enjoying these photo prompts and how they push me to think creatively every day. I am really busy at the moment but with this photo challenge in the back of mind I am safe in the knowledge that I will have at least a month’s worth of photos by the end of the month with very little effort. As most of you know, especially if you follow me on Instagram, that I love to document the everyday and the little things in life that make me smile or think differently.

This challenge is really opening me up to not only think creativity in a different medium (photography) than I am used to (beyond by holiday snaps and blog photographs) but how I now think about composition and what those prompts mean to me.

I am a total photo-a-day addict now! haha! 

Here is my May 2014 in a Photo-a-Day…

Photo a Day – April 2014

Hello there Buttoneers! If you have been following me on Instagram or maybe even Twitter, then you may have seen that for the second time this year I have been taking part in Fat Mum Slim’s Photo-a-day Challenge. 

I am still thoroughly enjoying this challenge and love how it pushes me think outside the box. This month I found that the prompts were a bit trickier than last months (Photo a Day – March 2014)

I loved that by just taking a minute or two out of my day, I was documenting the world around me and some of my favourite things.

The challenge to think of a new and creative way to compose each photo prompt was the fun part! Some prompts I struggled with for a while, some I knew instantly, but mainly I was proud of my photograph and took time to play around with composition and negative space. The best part is that it only takes a few moments of your busy day and yet you can not only feel a part of something by following the hashtag #fmsphotoaday, but keep the creative juices flowing! 

Here is my April 2014 in a Photo-a-Day…

Photo a Day – March 2014

Hello there Buttoneers! If you have been following me on Instagram or maybe even Twitter, then you may have seen that for the first time I have been taking part in Fat Mum Slim’s Photo-a-day Challenge. 

I really wish I had discovered this (I know…I know…I must have been living under a rock…) at the start of the year and at the start of this blog but, I got there eventually. I thoroughly enjoyed this little challenge and loved how it has made me think outside the box and in a different medium than I am used to. I got into a routine of taking the photograph through Instagram on my smartphone in the morning and this way I didn’t forget to take one.

I loved that by just taking a minute of two out of my day, I was documenting the world around me and some of my favourite things.

The challenge to think of a new and creative way to compose each photo prompt was the fun part! Some prompts I struggled with for a while, some I knew instantly, but mainly I was proud of my photograph and took time to play around with composition and negative space. The best part is that it only takes a few moments of your busy day and yet you can not only feel a part of something by following the hashtag #fmsphotoaday, but keep the creative juices flowing! 

Here is my March 2014 in a Photo-a-Day…