Natural Heart

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I thought one more romantic shot was in order.  Several folks posted cool heart-shaped cactus images yesterday, and they reminded me that I had this cool heart shot taken at the NC Zoo on our last trip.  I Googled to find the quote that I thought fit and used OnOne's PhotoFrame for the frame.

Raining and near 40 here.  Kids back in school for a make-up day.  It's a long story, but remember that they are  year round and having make-up days is difficult.  It's really only a half a day as they get out early at 12:45PM.  We're headed to the Lego movie and then to a rodeo later tonight.

I Love You

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One more window gel cling shot.  I wasn't able to capture a picture of these gel clings before the snow hit.  I took the shot with a white snow background, but it was cloudy out, and I didn't like it, so I used PSE 11 to cut the letters into a separate layer and then I added my own background color and OnOne PhotoFrame.  

Here's the original.

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Hope you have a super Valentine's Day!

Snow and Ice

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We had over 5" of snow yesterday. It started falling around 11:30AM and went strong until late afternoon when it changed over to sleet and freezing rain. We woke up this morning to a real winter wonderland and we have even more sleet and snow falling now. Luckily the ice accumulation has been pretty but not enough to cause very many power outages. We sure hope it stays that way.

I grabbed Johnny for a walk to the Carroll Howard Johnson Environmental Park this AM. We are able to get to it by walking through out woods back toward town. We saw all kindof neat things along the way including several places where deer had bedded down overnight, walked, and used the bathroom. You can't hide in snow! We didn't see any actual deer today, though. I'm sure we sounded like a herd of elephants walking through the snow.

I stopped to take a bunch of pics of foliage with ice on it. And Johnny was very cute, so I got quite a few shots of him studying the ice. He was excited to smell the pine where limbs had fallen and to check out how the ice coated various objects. He may be out of school today, but he did learn a few things in the woods. Hands-on learning is great!

Will we sled before this is all over. Maybe. For now I'm content to watch the snow coming down and the birds out my kitchen windows.

From upper left clockwise:
1. Part of a hummingbird feeder. Thought the icy spiral was very cool.
2. Johnny on a large rock formation in the woods.
3. Icy foliage in the park.
4. Johnny beside an icy pine tree.
5. Icy pine needles.
6. S curve in the creek in the park.
7. Icy red leaf in the park.
8. Frozen dogwood bud in our yard.
9. Deer footprint.
10. Another snowy view of the creek in the park.
Center is more icy foliage in the park.

Here is where the deer had bedded down.

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Another shot I loved.  Those curly Q's were fascainating!

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And another close-up of the spiral.

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Owl Be Yours

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Next in the Valentine's Day series:-)  When I make these cards, I always produce both 8X10 and 4X6 versions.  Generally I like the 8X10 better but 4X6 is more practical for printing. The frame is from another shot of mine...an intential misfire/blurred image.  And, yes, Donnie will be receiving a copy of all of these with his Valentine's Day card.

Here's the 4X6 version.

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It has started to snow hard in Raleigh, NC now.  We are expecting several inches but to finish with sleet and freezing rain.  Hoping we don't lose power but prepared if we do.  It's a regular winter wonderland out there right now!

Another Valentine's Day Card

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Here's the original.

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I inverted it and tinted it and then added the text and frame.  All done with Picasa except the text which was done in PSE 11.

LOVE

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Another use for window gel clings...photos.

Here is an alternate version witht the Sphere filter.

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And here's the original...yuck!

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I wish I had thought to straighten LOVE out a bi mre with PSE while I had the opportunity in my work flow.  Johnny loves putting these on the window for me, and he was as straight as he could be.

I really messed up my workflow last night and had to redo a few things and back track a couple of times.  What I did was not hard...a labor of love so to speak...but there were a few steps.  It was fun to work on while watching the Olympics.

I used Nix Color Efex Pro to alter the colors the way I envisioned them.  I forget which filters but I think one was nostalgic.  I used Noiseware to remove as much noise as possible.  I isolated the letters so the I could tweak them a bit and also so that I could use a Gaussian blur on the background.  It wasn't as smooth as I wanted.  I had to fix a few lines under the L with the spot healing and clone tool.  The two hearts also ended up being separate layers on the Sphere filter version.  I used a paper that PSE 11 has built in to make the frame and added a drop shadow to the center layer.  Although I fumbled arouond a lot, I am sure I could redo it better next time.

I did a lot of these gel cling cards around Valentine's Day two years ago.  Fun!  In this case I had added a cement wall texture over the gel cling.  When you do that, you can really remove any resemblance to the original gel look.

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I am sure there will be a few more gel cling cards this week:-)

D

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This week's alphabet letter is D.  I took an architectural shot earlier in the week which I really liked along with some kitchen tong handles and skewer and scissor handle tops, but then I walked the tool isle at Wal-Mart and saw a D in a construction stapler and decided to see what I could do with it.  This one belongs to Donnie.  He had 4 to choose from (at least one was my dad's).  I picked this one because it looked the 'prettiest' although I still had to fix several of the letters in HEAVY DUTY.  I made a pass at removing the lettering but in the end decided the grittier the better including keeping the manly letters.  There was a lot of back and forth on how much of a straight line the leftmost side should be.  Cocked left and straight didn't quite work so I went with slightly cocked right.

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Here's the architectural D rotated from an entrance to Cary Towne Center mall.

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These skewers at Wal-Mart were $9 for 6 of them.  I really wanted to use this D but thought that was outlandish.

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