Cup of Tea and a Bex

Creative inspiration for busy mamas

Life Captured, Inc: Memory making with my camera

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Mornings can be some of the most trying times with my little Ted.

Often I’m tired, Alex is rushing to get out the door and the babe is refusing to eat his breakfast.

These snaps probably make mornings look a lot more fun than usual. They were an assignment for a new online photography course I’ve started with Life:Captured, Inc. Billed as the modern school of memory keeping, their whole philosophy centres on the importance of documenting and, I suppose, appreciating the everyday.

So far, husband and wife team Trish Lee and Joel Chong of Sydney-based Tealily Photography have explained how to use our cameras in manual mode, the art of focusing and a little on composition. This week we’ve been asked to take a series of photographs to tell the story about some of our daily routines, and I chose to document a morning.

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It took me a day, I reckon, to sort of get the hang of using the manual settings on my camera. When I say, sort of get the hang, I mean take a photo which wasn’t totally white or totally black.

I’ve binned a lot of pictures to get a handful to submit to Trish and Joel for some feedback. The focus is a bit iffy on lots of these snaps, but I love the emotions in them and Ted’s little face grinning at Alex. He is so cheeky.

If you couldn’t tell, Ted loves his Daddy and he also loves pulling all the saucepans out of the cupboards.

He could take or leave toast, however. He’s trying to give it back to me in that first picture.

Do you ever stop to take photos of the ordinary moments? And have you got any tips for me on improving my focusing in these photographs?  I need to glue Ted to the sofa, I think.

(If you are a serial phototaker do sneak a peak at Life:Captured, Inc. The other half of the team Ronnie Mason, of The Shoemaker’s Daughter, is teaching classes on memory keeping and photo organisation as well as writing a wonderful blog sharing her thoughts on photography, memories and life in general. It’s a great read.)

Bye Bye Beijing

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My Chinese Teapot

Before we moved to Beijing we spent quite a few months trying to learn Mandarin.

I did Saturday classes and Alex found a podcast which he would listen to with his headphones on, randomly saying Mandarin phrases, with exaggerated tones. Bless him.

He was particularly pleased with all the greetings he mastered. Nihao which is, of course, hello. Zaoshang hao for good morning, Wanshang hao for goodnight and Ziajian for goodbye.

He practised quite a bit and once we got to China he was all geared up to try them out. It didn’t take Alex’s colleagues long to take him to one side and let him in on a little secret.

“We say bye bye”, they told him. After all those hours of practice. Just say bye.
But that was China.

You had to chuck out your expectations and your plans and just go with the flow. And that was especially the case with the air.

Is the air bad?

Many days the air in Beijing was ‘can’t see out the window because the sky is full of fog’ bad.

On those days you could see the smog in the halls of our apartment building and feel it in the back of your throat. I didn’t go outside, but the rest of the city did.

Not every day was that bad. Some days the wind swept through and the city was revealed. The buildings sparkled in the sun and you could see the ring of mountains surrounding the city.
But most of the time there was just a constant haze in the air.
We got used to checking our air quality apps on our phones. We’d often play air pollution bingo in the morning before we opened the curtains. What number was it going to be today? 50 was amazing, 180 was about average and 300 was go back to bed, try not to breathe.
I learnt lots of phrases about the weather in my Chinese lessons but the one I used most often while attempting to chit chat with taxi drivers was ‘congqi bu hao’ – bad air.
Along came baby
The air was a source of annoyance more than anything for the first few months, then I fell pregnant with Teddy and everything changed. I could handle breathing the yuck, but the anxiety about its effects on the babe was unbearable for a chronic worrier like myself.
We got more masks, more air purifiers and we even had a company come in to check the air quality in the apartment. I know.
Our escape
Alex and Teddy

Teddy arrived in May last year and we found new parenthood tough, especially as we could rarely go outside.

I remember walking Teddy in his pram around the complex in the pouring rain one afternoon because it had been the first opportunity to go outside in days. We got soaked but at least we made it outside.

So it was I left Alex working in Beijing and took my 11-week-old bundle on what was meant to be a short holiday to see my family in the English countryside.

We left Beijing on August 3 2013. And we didn’t go back.

A combination of the bad air, the approaching Beijing winter, Alex’s hectic travel and work schedule meant we kept extending our trip.

Christmas came and went and we were still living with my parents in the UK.

It was such a strange time and we missed Alex terribly. But he visited when he could and he knew I had my family’s support and could finally stop worrying about the air.
Return to Oz
Australian native flowers

In February this year (2014), Alex was relocated back to Australia with his job and we all moved back to our house in Sydney. We’ve been back in Australia for a good seven months but I only deleted my Beijing air quality app a few weeks ago. It was a great feeling.

Beijing seems like a dream now. I’m sorry I skipped out of our Chinese adventure early and I’m sorry I didn’t say a proper goodbye to our friends there. But I don’t regret taking Ted away from the smog. The air is wonderful. And I’ll never take it for granted again.

Image Credit: Pink Cloud Portraits for the gorgeous newborn and maternity pictures. 

Makelight Online Workshop

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I have many excuses for why I only seem to manage a blog post once every six months or so. I have so many ideas for posts, but they rarely make it to print. One of those excuses is my rubbish photos.

I think of a great idea for a post, but then I worry how I can illustrate it. I scroll through my phone and just see generally average pictures.

I’m not sure I can make that excuse anymore though as I’ve been shown the light, courtesy of photographer and Instagrammer extraordinaire Emily Quinton.

Over four weeks, Emily led myself and a crew of students through a wonderful online photography course where we talked about everything from finding your photographic style to the best photo editing apps for your smartphone.

I learned so much from Emily, who was incredibly generous with her knowledge and her time. Despite my fellow students being scattered all over the world, I really feel like we’ve been in the class together and that I’ve made some lovely mates.

Here are a few of the piccies I took during the course. It was so much fun, and a great excuse to buy flowers for yourself.

I was a little bit addicted to Instagram before I started the workshop; now I’ve got a definite problem! Are you on Instagram? Come and find me if you are. I’m @bexjenkins!

You can read more about the course and see mine and some other before and after shots here. Thanks again, Emily!

Yellow and pink flowers

Olives and shells

Orange roses