When we were first married, we regularly perused garage sales and secondhand stores for furniture, vintage items, and children’s books (which I collected before we even had children). One of my early purchases was a Mother’s Encyclopedia from the 1940s; I liked how it looked in my kitchen with my recipe box, and I thought it funny that there would be an encyclopedia just for mothers. Unfortunately, the last volume was missing, so there was no chance I would ever learn everything a mother needed to know!
Today, my daughter and I had a long phone discussion about discipline techniques for her three year old son. It seems like yesterday that I was working on improving HER behavior! Well, she turned out great and is a fantastic parent, but parenting is as challenging as ever.
When my children were small, I read books by Dr. Brazelton and Rudolph Dreikurs instead of the Mother’s Encyclopedia, but the little set of books has remained in my kitchen all these years. Today, I photographed them and used some of the techniques I have been learning in Kim Klassen’s Photoshop Essentials class to edit the photo (including the textures canvasback magic, not too shabby, and frame it). I experimented with using curves on just part of the image, decreasing saturation on a selection, and, of course, textures and layer masks.
melinda anderson photography 