Ludwick Marishane: A bath without water

Ludwick Marishane: A bath without water #TED : http://on.ted.com/eUtM

My Favourite Uploads to Flickr in 2012

All throughout the year I have had merely a few opportunities for both casual and formal photography. Most of the family shots were asked to keep private, but I always take those opportunities to shoot abstract or organic shots at the locations we meet.

The formal shots that I enjoy showing you are from events or paid-work – but they have been few and far-between during this last year. This has been because of a few reasons, mostly self-inflicted.

The biggest and most important reason: We now have a baby-boy in the house. The monster is growing up big and strong. Thankfully he has not stolen too much of my photo opportunities  yet I will admit to not taking my camera everywhere I go – he needs so many bags for his nappies/toys/etc that my camera gets second-billing, therefore is not a high priority.

On the few occasions that my camera did come with us, I also managed to upload a few to flickr (and redbubble and fine-art-america!) for your viewing pleasure.

Here are the finalists for each month throughout 2012 that I like most. Hope you like my effort… Wait, you might see a few photographs that show the progressive-bump on my wife. Aha, the little boy in our life got a few discreet photos online!

JANUARY

FEBRUARY

MARCH

APRIL

MAY

JUNE

JULY

AUGUST

SEPTEMBER

OCTOBER

NOVEMBER

DECEMBER

Whew, so many, yet is a great reminder of how awesome my year was! Yes, the year is not over yet!. According to my computer clock there is still another 5 1/2 hours left of the year! If we shoot any more photographs, I’ll post them in another article.

Here’s looking forward to another great year in 2013.
See you all there. Enjoy your NYE, share a few bottles, have fun with your kids and family!

Related articles

• Claim Three Free Months of Flickr Pro This Holiday Season (lifehacker.com)
• Why I Quit Instagram And Am Moving To Flickr (readwrite.com)

Toys my Son Wants for Christmas!

All I want for Christmas for my six-month-old son are the following items:

Traffic Play Rug

This would be perfect for every other small toy in my son’s small yet amazing collection. His few small cars and the pack of 20 green soldiers would be right at home parked around it.

This rug with roads and city-planning would give me reason to buy my little boy trucks, tractors, more cars, particularly Ferrari’s and Lamborghini’s, to have driving around this magnificent landscape.

Dual Super Slide ™

This would be the coolest toy that any child should/could want! The only downside is that we don’t have the space to put this in our backyard, so it would have to go in the front yard. It might make us a fortune out of the neighbours children.

Trampoline Tent

How awesome is this? If we’d had one of these when I was a kid, I’m sure I’d have tried to sleep on it every night. With four windows, two doors and a bouncy floor, this one toy would have got more kids convinced to be an Astronaut when they grew up!

Kombi Tent

When I was a boy Kombi Van’s were the most righteous car on the market. A van was the best way to do a photo trip around Australia or simply to drive in the city, running on the smell of an oily rag (read: with very little petrol in the tank). So to have it as a tent to plant in the backyard would be totally cool.

Zoo Keeper rack

My boy already has filled the top bunk of his bed with stuffed toys – pandas, horses, kangaroos, rabbits, bears, dogs, crocodiles, cows, and many more zoo and farm animals.

So to have a rack that looks like an animal-crate up-ended is perfect. It would mean he could still see them all, pull them out, then chuck them all back in at the end of the day! Perfect, my house will remain tidy… who I am kidding?

Building Blocks

Just like me, little Jai loves grabbing things, stacking them, then knocking them down. So he might as well build famous architecture in the process. These building blocks are the answer.

Maybe I can find them in other constructions … the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, the Sydney Opera house? Dad, would you build these for your grand-son? ;)

That’s all I could find tonight. Here’s hoping someone in our family will see, read and buy these toys. Hint hint! I am so glad we had a little boy. I won’t deny that he enabling to relive my childhood, but through his eyes.

Twenty Dollars can buy you four hours of Motivation

Gotta thank the Coromandel Valley Rotary Club for having a plant sale yesterday afternoon (Sat 3rd November 2012). After buying five native plants for $19.50, both my wife and I were inspired to dig up the front yard.  Four hours of digging up soil, raking it around and digging up weeds was painful. Here’s how it went…

But to get started we had to find tools capable of the job. These four worked so long as we wore gloves. Wooden handles are never fun to slide your hands upon!

I decided to cut a trench through the middle of the pile to establish how low we wanted to level it. Then we spent four hours attempting to shovel it all away. These next few photographs show that I moved about a tonne of soil!

With only a rake and a pitch-fork, my wife formed a gentle zen-formation of course sand and rocks as she raked it down the yard.

Seems she wasn’t content to just leave them, we moved three barrows of fist-sized rocks into the side yard.

To make up for all that, Mother nature blessed our yard with a ‘Bird of Paradise’ flower. Today we discovered eight beautiful flowers growing gloriously in the afternoon sun!

Hope to put the plants in the ground next weekend. By then we will have both recovered from the hard-digging we did today!