Happy Birthday, Sav!

Today was the birthday of our beautiful Bird...seen with her brother and our extra teen travelers this past summer in Holland. (Look at the restored native grasses on the dunes of that beach.)

Sav was born at home 16 years ago, on a humid August night, the heat breaking post-placenta with a thunderstorm and lightning. We passed her from person to person, among three midwives, grandparents, dad, and uncle. Her two-year old brother tried to make sense of it all, playing with a new red fire truck, his trade-off toy for entering the era of life-with-sibling. I'm so grateful for supportive family and friends, those midwives, and the wonderful person Sav has always been, since her own personal odyssey began. You are my sunshine, Sav!

Pushing the Pause Button on Social Media

I'm about to get on an airplane tomorrow, to visit relatives in Holland and Germany, and I've decided to push the pause button on social media updates for the next couple of weeks. No facebook, no twitter, no elenabella. Instead, I'll slip into the comfortable obscurity of a face-to-face life, camera, sketchbook and journal in hand. This is an experiment: I'm sure there will be much to say about the trip. But I won't always have ready access to the web, so I've made the decision to (try to) put the internet out of my mind. My focus will be on direct conversation, biking, hiking, sleeping, relaxing, and experiencing the chance to explore a few places that are now deeply familiar landing spots over in Europe. I'll be sharing some highlights after July 7th: come back in two weeks and find out what we did on our summer vacation! Bon voyage! Auf wiedersehen! Abientot j'espere..

And now, just for fun, that heroic moment when Obama swatted a fly. I like the fact that he slaps his own hand while smashing the fly: it's a double whammy, a calculated risk.

Tilt-shifting "Real-life" into Miniature

I discovered Tiltshift Maker through How About Orange, where Jessica Jones posted both original and tilt-shift photos of Venice (that's her image above). Tilt-shifting is a photographic technique that creates special effects when taking a photo, shifting the focus in unusual ways. One effect is to create the illusion of miniature scale models out of photos of real-life scenes.

You can go to tiltshiftmaker.com to easily transform your existing digital camera photos into tilt-shift style miniatures; no registration or sign-up required. Needless to say, some pictures work better than others.

If you are inexplicably fascinated – as I am – with miniatures, you'll find this to be fun. I tried it with a few pictures I took in Holland a few summers ago when we were on vacation there. De Banjaard, where we stay, is already a bit like a miniature village (especially if you stand above it, near the ocean, looking down), so the photo process just exaggerates that. (I really like the windmill in the gadget at the left, as it is a "miniature" of a miniature.)

Here are a couple of photos from Deutschland, too. My sister-in-law, Heike, said that when she returned to Germany after her first trip to the United States she had the uncanny feeling that Europeans "live in dolls' houses." These photos magnify that miniaturization-effect.