Kitty in the Light

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Kitty ws sitting on the kitchen floor rug looking so pretty in the morning sunlight that I just had to take her picture.  iPhone shot pp'ed with Picasa, but I aslo had similar results with PS Express on my iPhone.

The boys' elementary school had their first ever dance after school yesterday.  I volunteered to chaperone and grab some pics and video.  I think everyone had a great time!  I hope they'll do it again!

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Video

Reflections of a Winter Landscape

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Taken on the long way home from afternoon school pick-up.  Joey had a dentist appt. that took us off our norma route.  I noticed the reflections on this pond and turned around to take a few shots.  I have processed again with Nix Color Efex Pro.  Would love to shoot this again when the sunset sky color is better.

Here is the original shot.

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Birthday Cake and Candles

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Yesterday I mentioned that it was Donnie's birthday.  Here's a shot of him and Johnny and the cake I made.  Joey and I oved the cake.  Donnie and Johnny said to try another recipe next year.  It was pretty!  Next time, I  need two people lighting the candles.  It took me a while and the wax was dripping before I had the pictures I wanted.  Then in looking at all the camera and iPhone shots, the cake was washed out too much:-(  This is a merge of a picture of Donnie and Johnny with cake and  picture of the cake properly exposed.

I thought it also looked good in B&W.

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And here's a color picture just before lighting the candles.

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We'll be going to see the Harlem Globetrotters in March.  Donnie wanted to do a family activity for his b'day.  He also got more work gloves and a Home Depot gift card.  

Barn in the Fog

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Taken and processed this morning after dropping the kids off at school.  We had fog this morning, and I took the long way  home past this barn so that I could get a shot of it int he fog.  I looked for other interesting barns but didn't see any that sparked my interest.  It was a short walk through a small stand of trees to get to this clearing.  39 and light drizzle.  Processed...again...with Nix Color Efex Pro Detail Enhancer filter.  I am getting 'better' results with that tool than hand held and Photomatix.  I origianlly thought to zoom in to get ride of the pine tree branch but had read something recently about capturing foreground interest in landscape shots, so I decided to leave it in this time.

It's Donnie's birthday today, so time to go bake a cake...carrrot...his favorite.

Forgotten Barns

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These old tobacco? barns are just down the road a short bit from yesterday's shot. I didn't do a good job taking my shots and including the elements that I wanted, so I ended up using Microsoft Ice to stitch two photos together. This was necessary to get all of the fallen tree on the right. I then used Nix Color Efex Pro to give it an HDR feel using the Detail Enhancer and Pro Contrast filters. I don't like this shot anywhere near as much as yesterday's shot, but it's what I worked on last night and have to offer today.

Countryside Barn

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A barn along a road in the countryside not too far from my house.  This version was processed with Nix Color Efex Pro 4 from a single 16X9 image.  I also took bracketed shots and processed them with Photomatix, but I liked the one I posted better.  Also, after uploading my shots to Google+ (Picasa), Google automatically created an HDR version of my picture.  I thought it turned out great...just a tad dark.

Google version:

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Google version brightened:

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Photomatix version:

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Orignal:

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I think it's interesting to see how many ways one photo can be manipulated and interpreted.

C

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My contribution to the Alphabet Challenge for the letter C.  This is a 1 1/4 Husky brand wrench that I borrowed from Donnie.  I saw a wrench that was part of Steve Gerberich's exhibit at The Museum of Life and Science in Durham last month and set out to get a picture of one that I could post today.  Steve was using them for ears on some of the 'figures' in his artwork  I also tried taking photos of a C Clamp.  This is so much fun.  I see letters everywhere now!

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Go Broncos!