Cityscape & Shadows

Set the alarm clock this morning and got up at a halfway decent time, which made a big difference to the day. Emily was pleased because it gave us time to do some Harry Potter pretends straight after breakfast ;-) and I was pleased because it made me feel slightly more human and less like an irresponsible layabout.

And the day did indeed progress rather well. If you don't count the major meltdown first thing this morning because Emily's maths programme asked her to do something horrifically complicated and clearly well beyond her abilities..... 300-2.... I mean, how unreasonable!!! Rolls eyes. She lazily entered a wrong answer to begin with, got it wrong, and promptly burst into tears claiming she couldn't do it. Couldn't do 300-2. Okkkaaay. Now if she really couldn't do 300-2 that wouldn't be a problem. But since I know darn well she has the ability to do it standing on her head whilst singing the Grand old Duke of York backwards, I was rather cross with this morning's little scene. Fortunately, Daddy intervened with a dose of humour before the customary mother-daughter maths war broke out. Order and harmony was restored, and suffice it to say that after much giggling I don't think Emily's going to forget what 9x9 is in a hurry.

Ahem. So after that, it was back to a good day's work. This morning Emily settled down into her Light and Sound science topic, with various experiments on shadows and what the behaviour of shadows proves about light travelling in straight lines. She did some great diagrams and made notes; over the next few days we'll be looking at prisms, spectrums and colours, using mirrors to bounce light around corners, using coloured filters with the camera, looking at refraction in water and so on.

This afternoon, we gathered together piles of junk and Emily created a cityscape with them, which she then photographed with her new camera and loaded into paint shop pro, where she was able to cut the cityscape from the room background, paste it in as a new layer over a sunset photo she found on google, and darken it up to look like a silhouette. She also played about with the contrasts to create a bright alien looking cityscape too.

So this:
became these:


Emily found it quite hard to get the lasso tool to follow the edges perfectly but the slightly ragged edges make the silhouette look a bit like a ruined city, so we liked that effect.

Anyway, having mastered the cut portion of image away from background and superimpose somewhere else basics, Emily was keen to experiment with it, so she then went on to produce these two, the first of herself aged 5 at Normanby Hall with Cassie-cat superimposed at her feet, and the second of her head superimposed over Harry's - of course. Her head is a little bit too big in that one but she worked really hard to get the scales of the separate images right, which isn't easy when you're not overly familiar with percentages.
This evening Emily has been to yoga, where she and her friends Paige and Rhiannon had fun making up mirroring vinyassas, whatever they are. There was lots of laughter, so that was a successful end to the day. Oooh, and we've nearly paid off the second mortgage on our Animal World home, so we should be ready for expansion tomorrow. And one of the inhabitants gave us an apple the other day, so now we've got apple trees too. And a golden shovel (thanks Sarah!). Oooh the excitement!!