E is for Elephant - Etsy Inspired Challenge #128 (and a few photos too!)

For this week's Etsy Inspired Challenge, we have a great photography shop for you to be inspired by...The Hidden Alphabet. With lovely black and white, architectural, and unique photographs of letters, they offer all kinds of custom pieces that make for great gifts. I was inspired to search my house for hidden letters to spell the word 'love' but I'm still looking for an 'E' so I think I will save my letter pictures for another day. :)

However, I was able to find an E in my fun playing cards by My Mind's Eye and was inspired to create this card.

Here are some of the great E's you can choose from at The Hidden Alphabet.

Our sponsor this week is another Etsy shop, Paper and Roses, which offers lovely digital prints and vintage style embellishments.

Check out the Etsy Inspired Blog for all the details on how to play along in the challenge for your chance to win a great prize from The Hidden Alphabet or Paper and Roses!

And the rest of the DT has some great projects to inspire you as well!

• Angi
• Ann (February Guest DT)
• Ashley
• Carole
• De
• Emily B
• Jackie
• Joy
• Kerry
• Ruby
• Savannah
• Sherry
• Virginia

I also wanted to share with you all the progress I think I am making in my photography! I am so loving Elisha Snow's class over at Big Picture and if you are interested in improving your photography, I highly recommend her class...in fact she has a new one coming up soon. Even though it is different than the one I am currently taking I have no doubt it will be fabulous (in fact, I'm considering taking it too!) as Elisha is a great teacher and photographer!

We are just halfway through the class but I still decided to try retaking my self portrait from the pre-class assignment to compare my photos and see if I'm really figuring out this whole manual mode, aperture, ISO, shutter speed thing! :) So, here is the picture I took before the class started:
I do NOT love this picture and this was the best out of many. Prior to this class I was experimenting with non-auto mode...I even adjusted my white balance for this photo but still it absolutely does not compare to the photo I was able to take yesterday, in full manual mode!

I am so proud to say that I created this picture...positioning myself in front of a mirror with the right natural lighting and adjusting all my settings to create a nice self portrait. I still had to take several photos to get this one but just about all of them were better than my pre-class photo. I love that I was able to capture some catch light in my eyes to help make their blue/green color stand out.

I'll be sharing more of my photography soon!

(If you decide to sign up for any of the Big Picture classes, this code: 2680469F will give you (and me) 10% off a future class.)