Fall color

Took a short walk around the property a couple days ago and took these pics of some of the last remaining fall color.  I've been reading a new (to me) photography site and in these I tried a couple of the suggestions I found there. I've gotten lazy and don't often use settings other than auto so I shot all of these on aperture priority and that makes a big difference!  They also had some suggestions on capturing fall color and back lighting was one of them and a couple of these have both ideas incorporated in them.  Another suggestions was shooting flowers from below the blossom and that shot, using all three suggestions, is my favorite of the session!

Phone camera photo

When I went into the living room this morning the sun was just coming up and the only direct sun in the room was on the G. Harvey (Dallas, The Early Years) and, even that, was through the lace curtains.  Visually, it just had a mystical look about it.  So I took a picture or two and then decided to play on the feel of it a bit by changing the setting to sepia.  Of course the light was very low so the picture is blurred a bit but I think it all came together to make a very interesting image!

Going home from Brewbakers on a rainy Blue Monday night . . .

The fourth of four posters

This is the fourth of four posters that I did in December.  I started this primarily as a learning project in Photo Elements 9 and it's a natural extension of the Master Gardener project at the Wildscape and the Shutterfly photo book I made about it.  The MG's have a state meeting in March and there are competitions in several areas (write-ups of things that took place the previous year) and one of them is a poster competition.  From what I know about it, it looks like this one will give us a decent chance to place. We've brought home six or more awards the last two years!

Another Poster - This one is for the Winnsboro Farmers Market

The manager of the Winnsboro Farmers Market this year is a member of the Master Gardeners and when she saw the Spring Conference poster I did she asked me about doing one for them.  This is it!  I did several versions and they selected the one I like most.  I'm going to the printer this morning to pick-up yet another one.  It's a one-off that will be used for our entry in the Master Gardener state awards competition in March.

Merry Christmas!

More Photo Elements 9 - This time PhotoMerge Group

In this exercise I'm saying that the picture on the right is the best picture except for Lizzie - in the picture on the left she looks a lot better!

So I marked Lizzie on the left picture and Elements moved that image to the picture on the right and also did a lot of editing to merge it in properly - making change' to Julies leg and Kevin's leg also.

When you call up the pictures Elements uses behind the scenes logic to sync the images and that's why the display of the picture on the right has a white space above it. It's pretty amazing when you view the changes with a mouse click.

Wood County Master Gardener 2012 Spring Conference

This is another Photo Elements 9 project that turned out OK.  I think this will be the final version of the poster that we will use to advertise our conference in March!  It pays to have the right tools!

More Photo Elements 9

I've been playing with several things in Photo Elements 9 today - skipping the watching of tutorials and just playing with stuff using the limited amount of knowledge I've picked up in the last couple days.  These two are different treatments of a photo on the Cibo Vino Restaurant website.  I like both of them.  (BTW - take a look at the right column on my blog further down where I've added a few links to some of our favorite places here in Winnsboro.)  My main project is the poster for the next music event here but I can't post that because it has several things on it that are just in the wishing stages right now.

---

More learning Photo Elements 9

I watched over 20 of the on-line tutorials today from the most basic to a few of the easier kinda neat things.  Here are a couple tests of the "Out of bounds" feature. I'm definitely missing an important piece of this!  There's a keyboard command to turn it on but it turns something else on when I do it! I guess that means some Google time is in order?

November 2011

I like to look through my pictures at the end of a month to see what we've been doing with our time.  Of course there are some posts from November below this one but here are a few more pictures with some captions:  It was a pretty busy month!

Worked on our Wood County Master Gardeners Spring Conference arranging a speaker, acquiring a raffle prize, and worked on poster ideas.

Created the "Scrapbook Song" DVD for Alex

Found a picture of grandson Colby on FB.  He lives with his father. (Starnes)

Spent a morning traveling around Wood County taking pictures of fall color - but this one is in the back yard.

Had tree removal done at the house and tree trimming done at the Treehouse

Did some refinish work in the chapel and we replaced the cross with one more appropriate.

Spent an hour or so one morning taking fog pictures.  This one is almost the same place as the 'fall color' picture above.

Attended the Winnsboro Fine Art Market

Found a picture of granddaughter Haley on FB.  She too lives with her father. (Gattis)

Had the JamFest T-shirts made and have sold most of them now.

The sign for the city of Quitman is going in.  I worked on the project.

Attended two afternoons of music at the Winnsboro Fine Arts Market.

We are adding some stone pathways at the Wood County Master Gardener's Wildscape Garden at the Mineola Nature Preserve.

A cold Christmas season night in downtown Winnsboro!

Attended several music evenings at Brewbaker's Restaurant and Pub.

I completely rebuilt the upper pond - removing the stone, cleaning and repairing the liner, dug  it deeper but made it smaller, and replaced the stone, pump, filter, and waterfall.

And, of course,there was Thanksgiving and the week of prep that goes into it.

More on Aunt Maude's old photographs

Aunt Maude had lots of old (1904-1920) photographs - many of them very high quality and in good condition.  Unfortunately most do not have any identification on them - but some do.  And for the past week or so I've been using my genealogy software to try to find people that might be interested in having these.  A story has developed about the picture above.  Norm, the owner of the tree I contacted looked into it and his living cousin, Helen, is the sister of the two boys.  They are from Michigan.  Helen wanted to know how the picture got to Texas and I told her about Aunt Maude, whose maiden name was Littleford, and that she went to college in Chicago and that we have family there.  She then asked if Maude was related to (brother and sister) George and Lottie Littleford because they were friends of hers.  And, yes, Maude is related.  She's the daughter of another brother.  I'm still not sure why Maude had the picture of two boys whose last name is Weller.  (It's a 1920 Christmas picture.)  Maybe there's a relationship somewhere, I sure don't have it in my tree.  But I'm pretty sure that Aunt Maude would enjoy this "discovery" and the knowledge that the original of the picture will soon be on it's way to Helen!  It's been an enjoyable connection and exchange of information and there are a couple more working now.

On another note, I noticed today that there was one of those little green leafs on my cousin Jerry's (Jerry Ray Zapata) name in the Family Tree Maker software.  When I clicked on it I found his death record - he died last November 25th.  He was the last member of that part of the family except for one child of his and three children of a sister.

Working with Family Tree Maker and some old photographs

And this is one of my favorite old photographs.  Her name was Isabel Jeanette Van Hagan.  Her mother, Margarette,  was a Flanders and was the sister of my great-grandfather Charles Lorenzo Flanders.  I just think it's a great photo that shows how photography was thought of at the time.  And the time was 1906 and Isabel was eighteen.  She was probably named after her grandmother Isabella who emigrated from England.

Day One - Learning Photoshop Elements 9

BEFORE

AFTER