Photo Alphabet

I saw a neat photography project idea recently that sounded like something fun to work on this summer with the kids. I can't find the place I saw it originally, but it took me here to Family Fun for more details. The project involves looking for "letters" all around you in everyday objects, like the curve of a garden hose, the slats on a window or a tangle of power lines. You've seen the artwork out there spelling out words or names with such photos...well, we are going to create our own version!

I took the camera along on a recent family walk and here are some of our first finds. Jack & Sophie (and even Darcy) really got into searching out letter shapes in trees, sidewalk cracks, fences, poles, signs, everything! It was a little confusing for Sophie at first that we were not looking for actual letters on signs (like they play sometimes in the car.) And Darcy pointed to a Stop sign & said, look Mommy "O" and "S"!! But with some coaching, they really got the hang of it & we made a great start to our letter alphabet. We actually hope to get multiples of most of the letters so we can have lots of fun spelling out all kinds of things. Already though, we began to see that certain letters are going to be more challenging than others to find...like G, K and "J. Jack really wanted to be able to spell his name, but we couldn't find a good "J" no matter how hard we searched! But when Jeff & I were out for dinner tonight to celebrate our anniversary I spotted some street lights that are a perfect (upside down) "J" shape, so I'm going to take Jack back to that shopping center to see if we can't get a good photo of one!

There is also the issue of finding something that makes a great letter, but then the photograph doesn't look great because it has too much "background noise."

Take this "Y", 

it was one of the first letters the kids found, but we decided it is not a keeper because when you look at it the photo is too busy...the shots look much better when the letter takes up as much of the photo frame as possible...like this "H."

Here is another one that we just couldn't get to work. Sophie really wanted us to get an X out of the street signs, but it was impossible to get a clean shot without a lot of other things in the photo.

Here are some more letters that we found on our first hunt...

O

L

V

T

lower case o

P

X

C

S

S

D

A

The neat thing about this project is that it is training us to be more careful observers of the world around us. When we are out now, the kids are looking up, down & all around for possible additions to our alphabet! I'm excited to see where this project takes us & we will keep you posted on our progress!