Tag: object

My Magic Lamp

Krista asks in this week’s challenge, “What do you treasure? What’s most important to you?”

IN A NEW POST CREATED SPECIFICALLY FOR THIS PHOTO CHALLENGE CAPTURE SOMETHING YOU TREASURE.

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There are a lot of things in life which I treasure, other than my family of course, but one object that I have loved since I was a small child is this Sheffield silver-plated tea-pot belonging to my mother. It was a wedding present to her and my father back in 1945 when they married shortly after VJ Day. They didn’t have very much, so this was her pride and joy and sat in a little Victorian glass cabinet for many, many years.

DSCF3977As a very young child I used to love to polish it, begging my mother to allow me to remove the tarnish and restore it to a perfect reflective shine. Softly rubbing my cloth over its many faceted sides I thought it looked like the magic lamp in Aladdin, and used to daydream about what I would wish for if the Genie appeared.

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My mother sadly died in 1995 shortly after her Golden Wedding anniversary and one of the few things that I took from her house at that time was ‘my’ lovely tea-pot. Unfortunately all that love and polishing had removed some of the silver-plate and it was a looking a little sorry for itself. But I contacted a silver-smith in Sheffield and had it brought back to new by being re-dipped.

DSCF3976It now stands in my cabinet and every time I look at it I remember my mum and my romantic memories of the Genie of the Lamp 🙂

I have chosen this post for Ailsa’s Travel Theme too as this week the word is Romance. I hope you think it qualifies.

If you would like to see what others have come up with for this challenge then go to the Daily Post @ WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge 

(What has this post to do with Travel? You may well ask. Nothing really other than my father had been away in the Middle East for four years during the war and I always thought the tea-pot looked a lot like the lamp in the folk tale from Arabian Nights – a tenuous link I know)

Weekly Photo Challenge: Object

Cheri asks “In this week’s challenge, I’d like you to use one tangible object as both your inspiration and subject.”

There is a rule of thirds in photography (imagine your photo with a grid of nine squares) which basically says that you should position your focal point on the intersection of one of the horizontal and vertical lines so that the composition of the  subject is pleasing.

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There is also a time when you should break the rules, when placing the subject in the centre actually works.  Here I have positioned the padlock almost in the dead centre to capture a glimpse of another padlock fastened to the metal twisted wire below. If I cropped the image in either direction then the lock would have been isolated – it wasn’t as you can see in the header photo above – but I focused on this one because of its colour and the fact that it looks like a heart.

Note on photos: Butcher’s Bridge, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Couples write their names on a padlock, lock it and throw the key into the river – thus locking in their love for one another forever. The trend is believed to have been inspired by a cult novel, “I Want You” by Federico Moccia, who says it is “better than disfiguring graffiti”.

If you would like to see what others have come up with for this challenge then go to the Daily Post @ WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge