Under a Melbourne moon

Our time in Florida has begun. We arrived here a few days ago and are comfortably settled into our hotel until we can get into the condo. The weather has been spectacular, although thunderstorms are predicted for tomorrow. Tonight we have been treated to a full moon in a virtually cloudless sky and it was a photographic opportunity I just could not resist. You can even see Mars tonight, a shining pinlight to the left of the moon.

Our hotel balcony overlooks the ocean and so outside I went, just a short time ago. Out came the tripod, on went the camera. And instead of relying on the camera's special night settings that never seem to work as well as they should, I trusted my instincts -- and my memory -- and went manual.

I'm not entirely pleased with the series of shots I took but I'm not unhappy either. I love how the slow shutter speed allows so much light that the sky has a blue tinge to it. I'm so glad I brought the tripod along and hope to put it to good use on our winter escape.

If you haven't yet entered, please read my One World One Heart posting and enter your name there to win one of my giveaways. And if you have already entered, good luck!

One World One Heart

THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED!
THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO PARTICIPATED IN
ONE WORLD ONE HEART 2010
AND...GOOD LUCK TO YOU ALL!



I am quite excited to participate for the first time in One World One Heart. Last year I did visit several blogs that had joined in but chose not to play along myself. This year, I'm definitely in!

One World One Heart brings bloggers together from all over the world -- a chance to not only discover new blogs and the wonderful people who create them, but also provides opportunities to win prizes! It's a great way to surf the world and make lots of blog discoveries.

So, I bet you're wondering about my little giveaway. Here's the scoop:

Just leave me a message here, on my blog, on this posting, with a way for me to get in touch with you -- a link to your blog or, preferably, an email address. On February 15th at noon (eastern standard time), I will pick five names and each person will win a set of 10 of my art cards! And here's the best part: the cards are the winner's choice! Each lucky person will be able to choose 10 of their favourites from my photo galleries on Flickr. If you win, you might want to include this one:

or maybe you prefer flowers:

or maybe angels:

or maybe you want an eclectic mix and want to include this one:

As you can see, my art encompasses both photography and digital manipulation. I have always had a passion for photography and love this digital age and the powers of photoshop!

So, if you win, the choice is yours.....10 cards! You could choose one image and get 10 identical cards, or you could choose 10 different images and get 10 different cards -- whatever you prefer!

As well, on February 15th I will have a little digital goodie to email everyone who leaves a comment on this post. So.....let the fun begin!

Savannah windows

Savannah is one of my favourite places to visit. The captain and I always enjoy the bountiful fresh seafood and I always take hundeds and hundreds of photographs. The "historical district", which is where we stay, is incredibly picturesque. Yesterday we walked around for a few hours; these photographs are just four of the many images I captured. If you ever get the opportunity to visit Savannah, make sure you come. You certainly won't regret it.

The Signs of South Carolina

Those who know me well know that I am addicted to signs. I've always been attracted to anything to do with words and letters, so sign photography is just a natural extension of that.

We are now happily settled into our hotel in Savannah, GA, one of my favourite places. We plan to stay here for a few nights before heading down to the Sunshine State. These are just a few of the signs I snapped today as we drove through South Carolina; we had no set schedule so we spent a lot of time off the interstate. The result is the opportunity to capture photographs like these. The top photo was taken while the captain and I had a quick walkabout, while the other two were taken from the car.

Top: Gaffney, South Carolina
Middle: Union, South Carolina
Bottom: Columbia, South Carolina

Oh, and those who guessed that our wedding dance was Elvis Presley's Can't Help Falling In Love got it right.....I think Leslie was the only one with the correct guess!

Got any quarters?

I love roadtrips. You just never know what's going to happen or what you're going to discover. Like today. This morning we decided we would take I-75 only as far as Knoxville, TN, then veer east on I-40 to drive through the Smoky Mountains. That was the plan and all was going well, until we saw the sign that I-40 was closed completely at a certain point and we would have to detour. We are always up for an adventure and the detour wasn't too bad, costing us perhaps 45 minutes or so. We are not on any particular timetable so we didn't care. It was interesting to drive through the Smokies on a different route too. However, the clouds were SO LOW at one point that we were in them -- talk about having no view!

After that skyhigh adventure, we decided to call it a day here in Asheville, NC. Since we had a very large lunch at a chain restaurant in Georgetown, KY, called the Golden Corral (a buffet with, I swear, every food known to mankind, including -- joy of joys -- red velvet cake), the captain and I decided on a small dinner. Waffle House was nearby, so in we went. And what do I spy but this very cool jukebox. In Waffle House!

The captain and I thought about sharing a dance or two -- our wedding dance is one of those songs, y'know; can you guess? -- but in the end I just took photographs. Of course.

Greetings from Ohio

Yes, as Willie sings, the captain and I are on the road...again. Sunshine state, here we come!

Sunday snapping

Is it possible for Nancy and I to go anywhere without whipping out a camera? Um, no.

These pictures were taken on McCaul Street in downtown Toronto. The subject: a starry, rusty sculpture of sorts. We were only making a quick shopping stop this afternoon but we will never pass up a photographic opportunity.

One interesting sidenote: both of the star photographs, above and below, have minimal photoshopping. They didn't need it. I did have a little fun with the bottom image though; a little color burn never hurt anything!

If you feel helpless about Haiti....

No snazzy photo, no fancy photoshopped image. Just a couple of links I'm asking you to look at:

1) Ree Drummond over at The Pioneer Woman is having an unusual contest. No prize for the winner, but a big donation to help the people of Haiti. Please enter the contest, as she is also personally donating ten cents for every entry (and she already has thousands). You can see the details HERE.

2) Nina Bagley at Ornamental has a beautiful red necklace up for bids, with the highest bidder winning the necklace and the money paid going to help the people of Haiti too, to which Nina will add some of her own $$; Nina is also throwing in free shipping. You can see those details HERE.

Thanks for looking!

Inspiration from a friend

I like football. I know that not a lot of women do, but I am a big NFL fan. Starting in September, I know that every Sunday night there will be a football game on television, but we have reached the beginning of the playoffs and while there were two games on today, there wasn't one tonight. What to do with myself? I took the opportunity to catch up on my blog reading, then turned to good ol' photoshop. I had the time but more importantly, I had the inspiration to play, thanks to Nancy.

You see, she did a blog post today about playing with backgrounds. This rang a bell deep in my brain and I remembered an afternoon of fun spent in Nancy's basement, ages ago, tearing up paper and playing with tape and paint, making backgrounds on canvas boards. I scanned all of those, so I could use them digitally. Then I plum forgot about them. Until today, when I read how Nancy found some of her old backgrounds that she too had forgotten about.

So tonight, with no football on television to amuse me, I played around in photoshop and ended up with what you see above. While I won't bore you with every little step I did -- and frankly, I couldn't possibly remember every little step anyway -- I will explain a bit of its creation.

The bottom layer is a photograph I took in Ottawa of some roses, which I squared off and then altered a bit, using curves, colour levels, saturation and brightness. I think that was it. I also applied two filters: a canvas texture and poster edges. The next two layers are two different textures I created myself, including the digital scan of a tape-and-torn-text background I created that afternoon at Nancy's long ago. Next is a texture I found at ShadowHouse Creations, followed by a layer where I placed my watermark, then finally, the top layer, where I used an edge I bought at CottageArts. Each layer also has its own blending mode, but I won't test your patience by listing those too!

So, thanks Nancy, for the memory jog. The timing was perfect!

Narcissistic

I like being behind the camera. That's why there are so few photographs of me; I typically am the one taking the pictures, not posing. And that suits me just fine.

But for the first Art Creations Friday challenge of the new year -- a vintage photograph in a vintage frame -- I decided to step outside of my comfort zone and work on altering a photograph my sister-in-law Heather took when we were on vacation together back in '08. A photograph of me. (Actually, the original was a photograph including the captain too, but I've cropped out my own head shot here.)

Instead of using the vintage photo in the challenge, I chose instead to use the lovely frame and insert a photograph of myself, altered to look "older". I cringe at bit at this, but am using it just the same. All in the name of exploring new horizons this year.

Just don't expect to see this very often!

First freebie of the year

Hard to believe, but this is my 300th post. To honour that, here is my first freebie for the new year, a sepia creation originating from a photo I took two years ago, when we had lots of snow in our front yard. Click on this calendar image and you'll be whisked away to its page on Flickr, where you can download it in a variety of sizes by clicking on the "all sizes" button. Enjoy! And while you're there, check out my freebies set too -- I also posted a new texture today.

A Virtuous Woman

I am dipping into my to-be-read pile for my V entry for the A-Z Wednesday reading challenge. For ages, I have been meaning to read Kaye Gibbon's A Virtuous Woman and I just never seem to get around to it. Maybe this is the push I need.

Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say about A Virtuous Woman:
Jack Stokes and Ruby Pitt weave this strong, tightly knit love story in alternating chapters that begin when Jack, grieving over Ruby's death four months earlier, evokes the past. In flashbacks, the two richly cadenced Southern voices explore their vastly differing backgrounds, troubled histories and their unlikely but loving marriage. Born into a proud, prominent country family, coddled and adored, Ruby stuns her parents and two brothers by inexplicably running off with John Woodrow, a migrant worker who savagely abuses her. When John is killed in a brawl, Ruby, too proud to ask her family for help, begins doing housework for the wealthy Hoover family, where she meets Jack, a laconic, immensely capable tenant farmer on the Hoover land. He is 40; she is 20. Both lonely and vulnerable, they regard each other cautiously, carry on a wary courtship and embark on a firmly grounded marriage. The union is enriched by a small, supportive circle of friends, who, like the couple's landlord, Burr, are sharply etched and convincingly drawn.

This is the type of book I really enjoy -- great characters who face their share of troubles, with a love story at the heart of the novel. Good stuff. Now I just have to move it to the top of my TBR pile!

Just another photoshop experiment

I had to return a library book today that I never really got a chance to read. It came in shortly before Christmas and I just never found the time to devote to it. The book was Paula Guhin's Image Art Workshop and it's all about altering photographs (not digitally). Before it was returned this afternoon, I sat down with it and tried to power through the pages. As I looked through it, one technique in particular caught my eye and I thought, I could do that digitally.

What attracted my attention was photo weaving. In essence, take two photographs, the same size, that are either identical but with different colour tones (like the same photograph developed both in colour and in sepia) or two photographs that are very similar (like two portraits of the same face). Cut or tear them into strips, one horizontally and the other vertically, then weave them together using strips from both photos, creating one piece of art. The results are very cool.

The pelicans above are a result of my attempting this, but with my own spin. I was inspired by the idea but I went about it very differently. I opened the photo of the pelicans in photoshop, made some typical improvements (contrast etc), then duplicated the background and went a little crazy on the top layer -- over-saturating, cross-processing, changing the colour balance and much more. I then used the marquee tool, with the width set to the pixel width of the image and the height set to 400 pixels, and highlighted various strips of the top layer, cutting each strip away to make a new layer. I was then left with a top layer missing many strips. I turned that layer off, merged the strips into one layer, then increased the canvas size so I could play with the strips, moving them all a bit to the right to throw the whole thing off balance. I flattened the image and went back to the marquee too, now selecting strips from the blended image, this time turning those strips into sepia.

I then carried on, eventually bringing a texture into play, cropping the image and finally applying a clipping mask ... and, well, the finished result is what you see above. At first I considered it "unfinished", but the more I looked at it, the more I liked it just as it is! This is definitely something I will try again.

Numbers game

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics," wrote Mark Twain. I've always loved that quote. I do believe that you can manipulate statistics to prove or disprove anything. Mere numbers alone don't tell much unless you know the context in which they are used; they're facts, for sure, but facts alone don't tell a complete story.

Today's post is all about statistics. Facts. When a new year rolls around there is the temptation to "review" the previous year...media outlets do it all the time. Forgive the self-indulgence, but I was curious if I could document my creativity for the year by looking at the numbers. So, for what it's worth, here are the stats:

Total photographs taken in 2009: 11,021
Total photoshop projects started: 699

I find those numbers absolutely startling. I took more than 11-thousand photographs? 11,000+! Sweet jesus. How will I ever get around to using even half of those? And when you take into consideration that I took 7,826 photos in 2008 and started 569 photoshop projects (I checked that year too, while I was looking), it gets mind-boggling; let's not even get into all the pictures taken in 2007, 2006, etc. I could tie myself to the computer and never run out of creative possibilities even if I never took another photograph.

Um, like that's going to happen.

But let's get real here. What those stats don't reveal is that I often take two, three, even a dozen photographs of the same subject. I know full well that quantity absolutely does not equal quality. More than 11,000 photographs does not mean 11,000 great images. I learned a long time ago that it's good policy to take several shots to ensure the possibility of one good one. Still no guarantee -- and I have lots of photos to prove it -- but at least there's a fighting chance at a keeper. It's not always possible for me to take multiple shots -- when we're zooming down the interstate and I see something interesting, for example, I often have only one chance to grab the camera and click before we've driven past whatever caught my attention. Sometimes I'm lucky, sometimes not.
I also tend to start projects and not finish them, or finish them but never share them. The "dreams coming true" collage is a fine example of that. I created it for an Art Creations Friday challenge but changed my mind after it was done and never used it. This is the first time I've shown it, to anyone.

But enough about my output. Let's have a look at my photo galleries, found on Flickr. What do folks like to look at? Here's my photograph with the most views:



Not what you might expect would garner the most attention? Me neither.

This is the one with the second-most views:



Moving right along. This photo has the most comments and has been marked as a "favorite" the most times:



I'm not surprised; it's one of my personal favourites. And the photo with the second-most comments is also one I love:



The one with the second-most favorites is understandable -- it's the hula-hoops photograph from the contest I ran last year.



Flickr also has a category called "most interesting" and it's calculated by some obscure algorithm known only to them. It's never really made sense to me. According to Flickr, this is my most interesting photo:



Sure, it's one I really like and am proud to have created, but I could certainly point to others that are also deserving. This one, for example, which is the second-most interesting according to Flickr:



One intriguing sidenote: both the photograph of the dahlia bud and the gull were taken on the same afternoon, the first time we took Tippi down to the beach for a walk. It does feel a little special that the first time we took our new pup out for a beach romp was the same day I generated some great images. This, one of my favourite creations of '09, was also a project originating from that day's photographic output:



So there you have it. LOTS of statistics. What do they mean? Not much, really....except perhaps that I need a bigger hard drive and more memory cards for my cameras!

It's a new year, a new decade

The shortbread cookies photographed well but they have all been eaten. The turkey is gone. The living room is undecorated, the christmas tree at the curb. The only signs of 2009's holiday season left are presents still not put away, a bit of fruitcake still uneaten, and chocolates that are almost gone. All in all, a quiet and yummy Christmas here at the eatwritecreate household.

I'm glad we've entered a new decade and left behind the one with no name (the double zeroes? the oh-oh years?). Like all decades it contained good and bad, but while I remember the good with fondness -- and there was much goodness in the past 10 years -- I seem to recall the bad strongly ..... troubles on a personal level (losing beloved pets, my serious illness) and troubles on a grander scale (9/11, Katrina). I'm happy that 2009, which began so sadly for me, turned out to be a wonderful year for my family -- it's given me renewed optimism. I'm ready to tackle this new decade with enthusiasm and hope for the future. It feels great to be positive!

For my family and your family too, I wish peace, contentment, good health, wealth in whatever form means the most to you and, above all, much happiness and love in 2010 and beyond. May you laugh and smile often, may your heart be filled with joy, and may sadness and tears be infrequent. And thank you for continuing to visit my blog; I truly appreciate your support and your friendship.