Last day of giveaway postcard choices and votes.

We are very close to a beautiful collection.  Your choices so far are perfect. Here are a few more suggestions from your fellow readers.   Your responses to this project have been astronomical.   And in fact often you have pointed to the same shot, which has been quite startling. 

We can only have one Daisy card though, so here you will have to seriously help me choose between these two.  Daisy in front of the car is too long (Daisy enciente)  and I am loathe to crop it. I shall keep that one as your first choice for the calender.  Many of you asked to consider the cow and her cat! 

Below is a Farmy group shot.  Look at Mama with her head resting on Mia’s head. Remember all these photos are in quite a raw state. They will have a lot of work done on them before going to the printers.   Though now that I look at this group shot the back of that calf is too close to the edge.

Peghorn. I have a series of these as I crept closer to him (on my belly, thank goodness for my padded clown suit) so there is another that has more space around him.  The postcard will be approximately 6×4. 

Moaning Mia’s Moustache.  In the original I hopefully can add space for a printers crop  (called a bleed) so we do not lose the tip of that ear. 

Mama and her nose. Sunrise. 

With postcards there is a certain amount of the image that you will lose in the printing, so if the subject is too close to the edge, the cropping will compromise the shot. The trouble with a large number of the TonTon images is that he has been shot too close.   And his action shots are impossible. If the tip of his ears or his tail are cropped off the image will lose its power.  And I am not happy with the focus in this shot. (sigh)

We may have to miss TonTon out for now. 

In a Frogs Eye and the Bee on Marbles are IN!   They are wildly popular. Even if it is small, we will make sure that this is a perfect retrospective collection.

If you pop back in to help me again today it will be fine as far as the draw goes, everyone who comments, here or on FB or in an email gets one chance.  I bet you are wondering how we are going to do the draw. Well, TonTon is undergoing rigorous training on how to draw a name out of the PomPom hat. He is trained to bring me anything I point to then say Gimme, so this is an extension of that command.   I will fold each vote into a little paper parcel and he will (hopefully) pick out  a piece and bring it to me.  Three times. Well that is the plan anyway. A lot can go wrong.  I will shoot it for you so that you can see that it will be entirely random. (Random being the operative word) One way or another he will choose three winners.

Yesterday in the morning I cleaned every floor in the house. Then yesterday afternoon I went to the barn and thoroughly scooped every floor out there.  So my arms are feeling stretched this morning.  I see the dawn coming now. Today the sky is perfectly clear.

The moon last night was so full and so bright.  You know I have no curtains, so the bedroom was streaked in light, the window shapes creating long shadows, as though the afternoon sun was blazing  but had been put through some kind of lunar photo shop and all the gold had been deleted leaving only silver. The shadow designs were hard and geometrical. I lay in bed in the dark early, early this morning, before I got up to write, watching this light and wondering how to describe it to you. Some images cannot be photographed. They need to be spoken of. Some cannot even do that.

Anyway. I am loving this process of choosing a selection of pictures from the archives for the first collection of postcards to celebrate the 40,000 mark of the kitchensgarden.   This first print will not be repeated. It will be a limited edition.  Each card will be numbered. This is why I want to get it exactly right. Fingers crossed I have chosen the right printers and all goes well in that department!

Now, it is 19F (-7C) so I am going to put on all my clothes and  go outside to play. 6.40 am and dawn. I am getting earlier and earlier. It looks like it will be a fantastic sunny day today.

Good Morning!

c