From My Garden

A close up photo of one of the Hen and Chicks succulents in my flower bed.

Lynn

Grackle, Grackle Sitting In A Tree Are You Singing Just For Me

Happily listening to the birds singing outside my sewing room one cloudy afternoon.  Hopefully that means we have spring weather here to stay real soon.  Grackles are black birds with a beautiful metallic blue head and chest and can be noisy but bird songs are bird songs after a long winter and a music to my ears.
This bird does look pretty intense doesn't it. I wonder if it saw my camera close to the window.


Until Later,
Lynn

Self Portrait…Take 84….

Have you ever tried to get a photo of yourself….taken by yourself and have it look natural?  I was asked by the local newspaper to send them a photo of myself holding my miniature quilt as they are going to publish something about the quilt getting to go to the AQS quilt show in Paducah.  That was yesterday and the reporter wanted the photo today…YKES!

The reporter called late afternoon and the light was fading and I wanted a photo using natural light taken in my house rather than using flash which casts shadows so getting it done yet yesterday was out of the question.  I had planned to have John take the photos for me but he had commitments all morning and after lunch too so that didn’t work out either.  My only choice then was to take them myself. 

Got the tripod and the wireless shutter release all set up and the camera positioned in front of my design wall that I cleaned off for this photo shoot….well, partially cleaned off anyway.  Next decision was what to wear and took shots of 3 different tops and scarves before deciding the brown with the scarf was the best choice.  Decided a scarf hid my turkey skin neck a bit so wore one for the final photo.   Here are a few of the many goof up photos that wouldn’t work for various reasons and you can see how hard it is.  After all how do you smile naturally when there is no one there and then there is holding the quilt straight, position of the hands, backgrounds, hair, etc. to think about.

Head cocked a little too cutsie and don’t like the red scarf.  Wooden smile too.  

Problem with a finger in each of these…whoops!

Forgot to lower my hand that was holding the shutter release plus holding onto the back of the quilt makes it look like it is floating in air.  “Look ma, no hands” and it is tipped again.  I had a big problem holding the quilt level in a lot of the photos.

My scarf was overlapping the quilt in these two photos.

Too far to one side and the stuff I left on the design wall is showing.  (I know, a real mess right now!)  Plan to crop the photo but even cropped this would present a problem.  Had a hair appointment this afternoon to get a hair cut so decided to snap a few more when I got home and they do look better, I didn’t realize how frumpy my hair was before.  Actually, the one I cropped and sent to the newspaper reporter was the very last photo I took.  Finally I smiled naturally, held the quilt level and removed more stuff from the design wall so it wouldn’t interfere before I snapped the photo.  

Here is what my photo shoot set up looked like...now don’t laugh too much.  Hard to believe there is so much stuff on my sewing table but I didn’t want to move it as I am in the middle of another project and it wasn’t showing in the photo anyway.  I had to sit on a pile of magazines to make me higher too.  I did have the blind up when I shot the photos but for this one I needed it down so you could see the room and all it’s amenities.

So, if you ever need a portrait of yourself and have hours to spend with someone who has minimum equipment and knowledge just give me a call!

Until Later,
Lynn

Meadow Lark

Nebraska State bird is the Meadow Lark and we had a couple dozen of them in my flower beds and in front of the house one cold day last week.  They were rooting around in the flower beds close to the brick of our house where the snow had melted and must have been finding insects or seeds then they would hop out into the lawn…back and forth they went for quite sometime.  They were fascinating to watch and decided to snap photos of them from inside my house. 

I put my zoom lens (55 - 250 mm I believe) and started snapping photos in the sports auto setting.  They didn’t seem to mind me but I was real careful not to move much either.  I also took some in manual settings so don’t know which one this was and have not taken the time to look up the settings on the photo .  I am thinking manual as the grass in the snow is blurry behind the bird and I set the f-stop low so it would do that on some of my photos.  By the way I was shooting the photos through my dirty windows – that could be some of the “smudgness” too.  I didn’t do much to this photo in Photoshop Elements 11 but lighten the bird a bit as it was just a tad dark and give it a bit of sharpening.  I have to laugh as I probably took 40 photos of the birds and liked only 3 or 4 so it is good that it was not film like in the “old days”.
 
Enjoy,
Lynn

Playing with Photos

I have been having fun playing with the Photoshop Elements 11 program the last few days and this is one of the photos I played with.  Isn’t this just fun…the cattle escaping from the photograph.

I started with the photo below and as you can see the cattle were running the other way.  I don’t know if there are any rules that apply here but I just think that people and animals in photos look better walking/running from left to right so just flipped it since it makes no difference to this photo.
I am just beginning to explore the fun things in this program.  The frame and cattle walking out of the photo process was called Out of Bounds in the Guided area of PE 11.  I won’t go into how it is done because I don’t really understand it myself.

I am determined to learn more about Photoshop Elements 11 and to learn more about my Canon DSL Rebel 2Ti camera this year.  I have had the camera for a couple of years and am wanting to learn how to use more of it’s features.  I am reading articles, watching videos and experimenting to learn as much as I can.

Until later,
Lynn

Fireworks

I played with my Canon DSLR camera on July 4th and tried to take some photographs of the fireworks we watched that night.  I braced the camera on my knee to take the photos and think that if I would have had a tripod they would have been better.  I didn’t know what settings to use so just experimented and got the following photos.  Anyone that knows what settings to use on a DSLR camera please let me know and I will print them and put it in the camera bag for the next time.  Still Interesting shapes and colors even though they are blurry.

 

 

 

It was such a beautiful evening with no wind and the town had sprayed for mosquitoes so they weren’t too big of a problem.  We did spray with mosquito repellant though to keep the few that were looking for a meal away.  One interesting thing we saw just before the fireworks started and it was almost dark was a bat.  Yes, a bat was flying erratically up and down the street where we were sitting.  It would change directions quickly then off in another direction just as quickly.  I presume it was eating those pesky mosquitoes and other bugs.  I don’t think I have ever seen a bat flying before.

Lynn

Real Mums in the Flower Bed

Since I have not started anything new I am going to show you a photo I took of one of my mum plants in my flower bed with a small bee on one of the flowers.  Aren't you impressed with how many flowers it has on it? (Even though you can't see the whole plant it is impressive.)  Usually I pinch the buds back in early July so it fills in with more flowers.  I didn't even suggest that to John as he was taking care of the flower beds while I was incapacitated  with my broken ankle.  He did a good job at weeding and watering but that was as far as he had time or interest in doing.

My oldest daughter and two granddaughters came this weekend which was another reason I didn't get any sewing done.  The little girls are 9 and 10 and love to play outside plus we played a lot of games and put a jigsaw puzzle together too.

I used Photoshop Elements to add simple filters to the photo to get different effects.  Some are really interesting and some really add to the photo.  I didn't spend too much time with each one though.  I just wanted to see what they would look like.  I would really like to take a class on Elements to learn more about it but do use the program to diddle with my photos a little to get them the way I like them but don't even begin to use the program to it's fullest.

Enjoy!

Maybe I will sew something again soon.

Lynn