Sequoia Cottage Cards

    I want to introduce myself.  My name is Shelley and I live, love and laugh on Vancouver Island.  You are welcome to browse around on my site and I hope you will also visit my other site Fabulous Foodies Fixing Fine Food for Better Health.  I have been blogging about food and friends etc, since the beginning of 2010.  Food seems to be my passion whether it is searching through farmers’ markets to find the most beautiful, flavourful veggies or preparing exciting and interesting foods or taking photographs of the fruit and vegetables we take for granted.  My Mother lived in England during the Second World War and has often talked about how they lived on rations  When my Dad, a Canadian, sent her back to live in Saskatchewan with his relatives she couldn’t believe the produce that people were able to grow in their gardens.  I can’t imagine a life without the kinds of choices we have here in Canada and am grateful everyday that I live here.

So back to photos.  You will see when you look at my card images that these sentiments are carried through with the photos I take.

Why Sequoia Cottage?

    We moved to a very sweet small house about five years ago.  One of the reasons we were so drawn to it was the HUGE Sequoia tree in the backyard, then about 60 feet tall.  It is now closer to 80 feet and just gets more beautiful every day.  I’ve thought of our house as Sequoia Cottage from the first day we moved.

Why Photography?

    Photography has always been of interest to me.  When I was a little girl, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, my aunt owned a newspaper office in a small town.  She would often take me there and let me go into the dark room with her while she would busy herself with developing black and white photos.  It seemed like magic to me as pictures would start to appear, first as ghostly images and then more and more distinct, finally emerging fully formed.  And then there was the paper - so much paper all around.  I have since become a paper junkie; I love the smell of paper, the texture, the malleability, the colours and everything else about it.

    I remember watching the chap who was setting the type for the various pages to be printed and thought how very ridiculous it seemed for him to be working on a keyboard that was of the QWERTY set up.  Why, I demanded, does he not use a keyboard that had the keys placed ABCDEF and so on.  Much laughter ensued and I was told that this worked much more efficiently.  It was not the first time in my youth that I believed all adults had taken leave of their senses.

    The smell of the ink and the sound of the press were things that I would hold in my memories for many years.  But most of all the photography stuck in my imagination.

    Over the years I took courses in photography, one in particular was a black and white photography course where I got to develop my own rolls of film.  The magic was still there and I was as thrilled seeing my own images develop as I had been so many years before.

    As time passed I found myself narrowing down the types of images I enjoyed creating; most of them are groups of objects or close ups of floral subjects.  I also have a deep love of golden retrievers having owned four over the years.  They have always figured heavily in my photographs 

    With the advent of digital photography I bought my first digital camera in the late 1990s, a Sony Mavica.  More magic.  I’ve progressed over the years to my current camera, another Sony which I love.  I take about ten thousand photographs a year and only the best ones become my cards.  I hope you will enjoy them as much as I do because I only sell ones that I would be willing to buy myself.  I like to think my Aunt would be delighted.