Anna

I'm posting another version of this shot because Anna decided she wanted to be included.  I was so  involved in my

shoot I hardly realized she was sniffing the roses.  Again I did most of the editing in Lightroom and then went to Photoshop where  I added Kim's "Mary" texture from her Downton Abbey collection, the text and a border.

~ Calm ~

New Camera, New Class

Wouldn't you know that I would get a new camera and start Kim's "Start to Finish" class at the same time.  I finally decided to upgrade from my old Rebel XT to the Rebel T5i.  

I thought it would be easy-peasy to make the switch.  Well…..I've spent the last two days reading the manual and attempting to do a shoot for Kim's new class. 

 It did take me a while, mostly because I was following her suggestion to "follow or find the light" in my very dark house.  I set up my still life and then took exposures at 10:00AM, 12:00 noon and 2:00PM in front of the sliding door to our bedroom which gets some light, mostly in the spring and summer as the sun gets higher in the sky.

The above image I edited almost entirely in Lightroom 5.

This next image I continued on in Photoshop, adding one of Kim's textures "Reentry", some text and a frame.

Kim's class is, as the name implies, about how she does her still life photos from "start to finish".

I'm looking forward to learning a lot from her.  She is among the very best teachers I've encountered.  Her classes are always fun and I'm never disappointed.

~ Calm ~

Beyond Layers II - Week 51

In our Beyond Layers II class, Kim gave us a link to a fun Photobooth frame action for our project.  You can either set up a template in Photoshop or you can download the action link.  If you use the action it makes your work easy as 1-2-3.  I did a black/white adjustment layer to these photos of my granddaughter, saved them to my desktop.  When you activate the action, it asks you to select the photo and then places it for you on the correct layer, and the same with each photo.

You can have either the white frame or do a black fill layer on the background layer to get the black frame.

I then created an 8.5 x 11 new white file, rotated it so it was "landscape", moved the Photobooth image on to that white background, duplicated the layer three times, so it would look like a photo package.

Remember those old Photobooth pics we used to do?  A step back in time….

~ Calm ~

Week 11

Two weeks have raced by….can't tell you what happened.  Life just has a way of getting in the way sometimes.

I finally finished this spread for week 11 of the Documented Life Project. The challenge was to draw, photograph or collage a bird into the spread.  I kept waiting for the perfect bird image to use…thought maybe I was actually going to have to draw a bird.  That would be a novel idea .  But I did finally find the image in an old Victoria magazine.  You know how you have the "Aha" moment?  I just knew I wanted to use it.  Plus I have the washi tape with the birds on the line that I could also incorporate.

I keep telling myself 15 minutes a day.  I should be journaling every day!  Notice the "should".  I find that I want to make my journal entries little works of art.  I'm not happy to sit down and slap some paint and writing on a page.  I just have to mull over these page spreads, and it takes me several days or sometimes a couple weeks to finish them.

I'm happy with this one and so on to the next one -- Week 12 which is to "cut up a magazine and add to a spread."  I sort of did that here, but I love cutting up magazines, so it will be more fun.

~ calm ~