A Little Girl

"Gift/s" is this week's prompt at Bonnie's Photo Art Friday. What a beautiful theme - we all have gifts in our life, don't we? It can be a beautiful morning, an unexpected flower blooming in your garden, a cup of coffee brought to your bedside or a spectacular sunrise. The list is endless.

My gift - the best and biggest and most miraculous gift ever - is this little girl:

This is my daughter at three years old. Just two months before this image was taken we had moved to California from Germany. My daughter had attended only a few weeks of preschool before it closed down for the summer. Too short for her to make friends or learn enough of the new language to communicate with other people using words (she had many other ways, though, especially her killer smile). She missed Germany and her friends there, the little toddler group that she went to every afternoon. But still she kept her irresistible smile and her joy of life. Those first few months in the States were hard on both her and myself, but somehow we got through it and remembered to have fun every day. She was a real trooper.

She still is. The best gift ever.

This photo was taken with my film camera. I couldn't find the negatives anymore so I had to scan it from the scrapbook page I had created years ago. Thanks to Photoshop I could still work with it.

First I cropped it and then added the blur, taking the blur away in only those places I wanted to. Added Bonnie's texture "Autrefois" and blended it in soft light at 100%. Copied it and that's it.