Welcome to CLIQUE!
I can trace my love of photography back three generations, to the early 1900s and my paternal great-grandfather, Henry Mattson. I have a really cool photo that he took of the old family homestead in Minnesota, sometime before 1910. According to family history, Grampa Mattson frequently took photos of his world - the people and places that he loved.
It warms my heart to know that this love of photography didn't skip any generations as it passed down to me! I am blessed to have such a legacy and I hope to pass it on to my own children and grandchildren some day.
I experience a physical and spiritual thrill whenever the Lord shows Himself in His marvelous creation around us and in the people I meet. My dream vacation would be to spend a year or two just traveling around the US, stopping at little out of the way places and photographing the interesting characters and the beauty of nature to be found along the way - those things that draw me closer to GOD and help point others to Him, too.
This week's theme for TT is "Gratitude." I took this photo of my grandchildren with my iPhone on Oct 2, 2011. Changed the color photo to sepia, cropped it, added Kim Klassen's "Word" texture (Soft Light blend mode @ 100%) and "Stained Linen" texture (Pin Light blend mode @ 30%), created the word art ("Damned Hearts" brush; VT Portable Remington & Tekton Pro fonts); added a border using a corner brush by "Swirls by Kaffaleen" and added the babies' names and the date (Tekton Pro font).
The reason I chose this photo as my entry has two levels... On the surface, I am grateful for these beautiful babies; grateful to be their "gammie." They are sweet, adorable, precious gifts from GOD - my treasures. On a deeper level, due to some challenges in our family during the past 14 months, relations between me and my children have, at times, been strained and time spent together as a family has been few and far-between. On the night I took this photo, my three youngest kids - J, Jenni and Matthew, my son-in-law, Ivory and the grandbabies, Amelia and Adrian, all met together for dinner; for Jenni & Ivory to meet their new nephew, who was 9 days old at the time, and to hand out gifts they had picked up during their recent Caribbean cruise. Unexpectedly (though I firmly believe it was a "GOD thing"), I was in the neighborhood and able to stop in to say "Hi." I only expected to be able to stay for a few minutes, but actually spent an hour and a half with my beloved family -- a blessed gift that truly filled me with GRATITUDE...
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| Straight out of camera |
Please stop by Kim Klassen's Cafe and check out all the lovely creativity to be found in this week's challenge entries!
~ klb
