Wednesday, May 10, 2017

From my garden...

"Happiness held is the seed;
Happiness shared is the flower. -John Harrigan

Here's what's blooming in my garden.  This iris was transplanted from our Roswell home.  We bought it at the Iris farm in the Hondo Valley and had it planted in our backyard in Roswell.  The last time I was there, I dug up some of my favorite irises and shipped them to our new home in NC.  I was happy to see they over-wintered nicely.

Texture from Kerstin Franks

This variety of iris was given to me by a local friend.


"Spring came suddenly, the rain stopped, the days grew noticeably longer, and the afternoon light felt powdery, as if it might blow away."-Jane Mendelsohn

I am still trying to get used to the weather around here.  About the middle of March, we had several warm days in a row.  I thought, winter must be past, so I put away all my winter clothes.  Wouldn't you know that right after I did that, we had many days of very cool weather coupled with days and days of rain.  I asked a local resident if all springs were like this.  He said it's called blackberry winter.  After the blackberry plants set their blooms, it warms up.  Warmer temperatures are on their way...the blackberry bushes have bloomed...

I took this ordinary photo of a blackberry bush...
Blackberry bush...

and worked some digital magic into it... the words at the bottom left say, "each dawn is a new beginning."

See the girl in the right upper corner of the photo.

Hugs to all.  Be blessed.

Saturday, May 6, 2017

Grandson magic...

"The landscape belongs to the person who looks at it..." -Ralph Waldo Emerson.

It is another rainy day which lends to creativity, and catching up on photo editing.  And making crazy composite images.   Here are my two photos I used to make my composite.



Here's my composite...


I hope the sun is shining tomorrow.

This and That...

"There is no abstract art.  You must always start with something.  Afterward, you can remove all traces of reality." -Pablo Picasso

Our camera club went on field trip to do night time photography.  It was not the most successful of our outings.  It was bitter cold, cars kept driving by... ruining our total darkness, and there was not a lot of interesting objects to photograph.  But it was fun getting together with others in a like minded endeavor.  Here are some of the results.

The view before the sunset...

Two of my girlfriends who went along with me...

one of our props...

Night sky...

The big tree was light painted.  There was a lot of light pollution from the town.

I had one photo that was almost completely blown out, but I liked the effect of the trees.  I decided to keep it to see what I could do with it.
Here's my before photo.  I liked the ghostly effect of the trees.

Here's what I did with it.

I added textures, an old map, I extracted the tent from my photo and added it, and then I used a Kim Klassen brush to add the dream words.  Loved the end result.

One of my friends asked me to design a composite using an iPhone photo  of them sitting on her mother's windowsill.  She had this vision of Christ pouring faith, trust, hope, and joy into each cup, and each one of these pouring out of us.

Her cups on the windowsill

Her vision

I removed the birdhouse, pole, and thermometer from the background of the cups.  Then I added what I thought was Christ pouring into the cups.  She had an acrostic for each of the words: hope, trust, faith, and love.  I added those to the composite as well.  Here's my design of her vision.

My result

The last bit of images is of a Wisteria bush...tree?  It was huge...at least 30 feet high.  It was mingled in among the branches of a tree.  I took one of the flowers, and made my own image.


That's about it for my images for now.  Be blessed.
 
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