Photography Challenge - Weeks 4, 5, & 6

I've been back from Florida for a while now and I'm finding it hard to get back into the swing of things. Sewing, crafting, blogging, cleaning, laundry, cooking, grocery shopping...you name it and I will find an excuse to put it off. Procrastination should be my middle name. Anyway, it's time to play catch-up in the Photography Challenge being hosted over at A Step in the Journey. I missed week 4 due to vacation and week 5 due to pure laziness, so I'm going to post photos for those two weeks along with this week's entry.

The theme for Week 4 was "Dinner."  I am amazed by some of the beautiful food photography I see on the web.  I'm pretty sure the Pioneer Woman could make a Hungry Man frozen dinner look delicious just by taking a photo of it.  My food photography skills leave quite a bit to be desired (as do my cooking skills, but that's another issue entirely! ha!)  My dinners never look "cookbook perfect" and the lighting in my kitchen in the evenings is terrible, but every now and then I make a breakfast that's not too shabby and the morning light on my kitchen table is pretty great, so I'm going to showcase breakfast instead of dinner.  We'll pretend I took it at dinnertime and call it "brinner."

I snapped this photo at around 10am at my kitchen table.  My daughter and I had just made cinnamon waffles topped with apple butter syrup and were about to dig in when that little voice inside my head said "take a picture."  I had the idea to make the photo look like an old-fashioned advertisement for an diner, so played around with the Posterize effect in Picnik and added a bit of text.  Meh.  Not exactly what I imagined, but close enough.

The task for Week 5 was to take a photo from a high angle.  I tend to do this quite a bit whenever I'm taking photos of my crafts or quilts, so I cheated and dug around in my photo stash and found this one...

This photo was taken from straight above.  This is just a small section of a huge cathedral window quilt made by my grandmother, known as GeeGee to my kids.  The full sized quilt is made of hundreds of these "windows," and the entire thing was made completely by hand with a just scissors, needles, and thread.  Not a sewing machine or rotary cutter in sight.  In other words, GeeGee is amazing.  :)

And finally Week 6...this week's goal was to capture a photo from a low angle.  As soon as I saw this week's theme, I knew exactly which photo I wanted to use. 

This photo was taken inside the Illinois Memorial at the Vicksburg National Military Park.  We stopped in Vicksburg on our way to Jackson, Mississippi, the halfway point in our drive to Destin.  I'm a huge history nerd, so I made my husband drive through the Vicksburg battlefield.  I'll post a few more photos from the battlefield in another post.  The Illinois Memorial is a large, domed white marble structure that sits atop a hill.  My daughter and I climbed the 47 steps (one for each day of the Siege of Vicksburg) to the inside of the memorial.  Inside, bronze plaques line the walls, listing each of the 36,000+ soldiers from the state of Illinois who participated in the siege.  This memorial was truly awe inspiring.  The glimpse of blue sky through the hole in the domed roof was so serene and beautiful, I couldn't help taking a photo.

Okay, now I'm back on track.  Next week's theme...what you wore today.  Who wants to see a picture of my gnome jammies?  ;-)