Texture Tuesday, 'and then some'

Well, I missed last Texture Tuesday because my computer gave out on me. It was getting old and didn't have enough power to handle all that I expected it to. So now I am enjoying my new computer's speed and predictability. Yay! And double Yay! because Staples was able to retrieve everything off my old computer that i needed, mainly photos :)

I am ready to forge ahead with this week's Texture Tuesday
'and then some' eDition. All that's required in this week's challenge is to use the texture 'and then some' on one of our photos.

This weekend I paid a visit to one of my favorite places to photograph, Mountain View Cemetery. I wanted to see if the trees were showing more autumn colors, as it is one of the few places I can go to find leaves that change in autumn. I was sidetracked by some urns of flowers hanging on the wall of the tombs. I thought perhaps they would be good candidates for some texture.

Eventually I plan to open a tab devoted to Mountain View Cemetery. I have been photographing the place for 7 years, and I never get tired of it. It is really quite beautiful. The architect that designed the cemetery also designed Central Park in New York. It has amazing views of the bay and San Francisco, and many of the founders of the area are buried there.

I did get one photo of the autumn leaves I was happy with, but they have barely started to change. If I remember correctly, they will continue to change throughout winter, and sometimes they are still around in the spring.

All three photos were textured with Kim Klassen's 'and then some' along with:
1st photo: Yesteryear and Portrait
2nd photo: Portrait and Serendipity
3rd photo: The ladder and Serendipity

O.K. that is all for this week. Happy Texture Tuesday!

No Tricks, Just A Treat

This is one of my foggy Mt Diablo photos with a Nelly Nero action, Milk. If you look in the upper left corner, you will notice the branches form a cat-eyed mask, so I thought it would go well with the Halloween theme.

Now for the Treat : ) Here is a fun recipe I want to share for Halloween. For those of you that are looking for a healthy alternative to the sticky-sweet caramel popcorn that is associated with autumn, I have a salty-sweet recipe for kettle corn. You can make this kettle corn on your kitchen stove, you don't need a big copper cauldron like the ones they use at the carnivals. If you know how to make regular popcorn on your kitchen stove, you already know how to make it, I just need to give you the ingredients and a few tips. If you've never made popcorn on your kitchen stove, only in the microwave, well you won't believe how easy it is! Now lets get down to business.

Ingredients:

you just need 4 ingredients and a 2 qt sauce pan with a properly fitted lid

2 tsp of canola oil (or cooking oil of your choice)
1/2 tsp of fine sea salt (or table salt if it is all you have)
1 Tbl of white sugar (it can be heaping a little bit)
1/2 cup of popcorn

Put the 2 tsp of canola oil in the 2 qt sauce pan, along with 2 kernels of corn. Place the sauce pan over a medium-low flame or burner. Occasionally shake the pan while allowing the saucepan to heat up, until the 2 kernels of corn pop. Now add the 1/2 cup of popcorn. Sprinkle the sugar evenly over the popcorn and swirl around to mix (see photo)

Put the lid on the pan and continuously shake back-and-forth until popcorn is finished popping. You will know it is finished popping when the popping stops or the lid rises (see photo).

The popcorn will feel a little sticky, but go ahead and pour the popcorn into an over-sized bowl and sprinkle it with the salt. Now gently toss the popcorn in the bowl, kinda like the chefs do pancakes. The tossing motion will distribute the salt and dry the stickiness of the popcorn. Do not skip the salt as the popcorn will have a very, very bland flavor (I know because I tried it :) If all goes well, you should have a crunchy, salty-sweet treat!

This is the first time I've posted a recipe, so if you have any problems with the directions, don't hesitate to let me know and I will get back asap with a solution. I am a "bit of this & a bit of that" type of cook, therefore I had to force myself to measure out the ingredients so I could post the recipe. It took a couple of tries to get it just right. I originally found this recipe in a magazine, I don't remember which one though, and I have changed it to accomodate my taste. I've tried adding more sugar and using a bigger pan, but I didn't get very good results. The popcorn was a bit soggy and the popped kernels were rather small. You could probably add a tad more sugar and get away with it, but I wouldn't add too much more. Oh, and for those of you watching your salt intake, all of the salt doesn't stick to the popcorn, you will find at least 1/4 in the bottom of the bowl when you are finished.

Happy Halloween to all you wonderful bloggers! I hope you try this recipe. If you play around with it and come up with some new ideas, please let me know so I can try them too. Happy Eating!

Texture Tuesday & Red

Well I have been working hard to come up with a picture for the Texture Tuesday theme, Red. It wasn't so hard finding something red, but it was hard finding something that was worthy of a Kim Klassen texture. I finally came up with one that would take a texture. It took a couple of days of playing around to get something I was satisfied with, and here it is, the shelf above my kitchen stove.

mouse over to to view before

click on this version to view larger : )

I used two of Kim's textures, Trust and Word. I dimmed the color with a gradient map adjustment to give it more of a subdued feel. The paint on my kitchen walls is a sunny yellow color, and I wasn't liking the way the textures looked on it. I like the look of these textures as they give a bit of a vintage look to the photo.

Here are some other "reds" that I was working on. They are abstract photos of autumn leaves. I was playing around with my 100mm lens to see how abstract I could get the photos. I still have some work to do to get more of what I wanted to accomplish. Here are a few of the ones that I kept.

On these photos I used Kim's Portrait texture. All I did was use the Multiply blend mode at around 50%.

Well that is all I have for the Red eDition...Happy Texture Tuesday everyone!

Gratitude & Texture Tuesday

Well this is another hard one! There are so many things to be grateful for, that it took some time to figure out what I would post about. Really, I can't just settle on one, so I will post about a few things I am grateful for right now.

While deciding on the picture theme for Texture Tuesday, I was looking through my unedited photos and realized just how grateful I am to live just ten minutes down the road from a grove of coastal redwoods. When I need my fix of nature, I wander through them. Here is a tree I pass on my way to the redwoods.

Whenever I pass this tree on a foggy morning, I have to stop and get some pictures of it. I used some of Kim's textures on it, Yesteryear, Serendipity, and The Ladder.

I tried some textures on the following photos, but they didn't take very well. I'm still new to textures, so it may be a while before I can get the results I want from them. Anyway, I love a foggy morning in the redwoods. I think these pictures tell the story why.

This is a picture of a redwood fairy ring. When a redwood tree dies or is cut down, the root system remains and starts sprouting trees that are genetically identical to the mother tree. The new growth grows in a ring. When the new growth is still young, it sprouts up like a gigantic wreath, with a bare middle. It is said that fairies come out in the moonlight to dance in them : )

Well, there is more I am thankful for. Mostly for coming across Kim Klassen's Cafe Blog while looking for a tutorial to make textures. I was so taken by her blog that I signed up for her free Skinny Mini eCourse. I didn't stop there, I had to take the Essentials course to learn more. Finally, it is through this discovery that I started my blog, and am able to be among a group of talented artistic women that I admire and enjoy sharing the love of photography. I just want to say thank you to all the wonderful bloggers who take the time to share their interests and talents. I truly enjoy your blogs and am grateful to be a part of the blogging community.

DIY Heart Bokeh

For those of you that are interested in playing around with some heart bokeh, here are some links and tips to get you started. There were two links I used. I liked this one for the visuals and instructions on how to make the cap that goes over the lens.
instructions

And this one for the information that tells you what size lenses you can use and how big to make the shaped hole.
lens sizes

I made my heart bokeh cap for my 50mm 1.8 lens and it works great! Some people complained in the comments of the above posts about only getting a heart shaped vignette. They either didn't make the hole the appropriate size, or they weren't focusing properly. I made other shaped caps, a maple leaf and a butterfly, but I found that they had a tendency to fracture the bokeh, and I didn't care for that (see photos below).

Materials I used for the heart shaped bokeh cap:
-Black matte scrapbook cardstock
-Exacto type cutting knife
-Regular cutting scissors
-Scotch tape
-Sharpened Pencil
-Ruler w/centimeter measurement
-Campbell's soup can (works great for measuring the diameter of the 50mm 1.8 bokeh cap)

Once you have gathered all your materials, follow the instructions on the links above, and you shouldn't have any problems. But I have one bit of advice, make sure you don't get the bits and scraps, you will be working around, in your camera.

Once you have your cap made, go out and create some wonderful bokeh. A sunny day is best, but anything that creates wonderful bokeh will do. Here are some examples of my favorite shaped bokeh photos...

Here are a few of the only butterfly bokeh photos I liked enough to show.

This was a fun abstract that i cropped out of a photo.

These are a couple maple leaf bokeh photos. They didn't turn out so great, but I posted them because they were taken for a couple of Canadian Flickr friends on Canada Day. I just wanted them to know I was thinking of them : )

Well, that about does it for the shaped bokeh photos. Thank goodness I misplaced my 50mm bokeh file, or else you would be suffering through more of them ;) If you give the shaped bokeh a try and have some questions, just post a comment and I will get back with you as soon as I can.

In Search of Autumn

I love autumn! So after work on Friday, the first official day of autumn, I set out to see if I could capture some signs of it for the Texture Tuesday theme this week, LOVE. Living on the west coast it isn't such an easy thing to do, but I managed to capture a few autumnish pictures. Here is the acorn bouquet I brought home that evening.

It has two of Kim Klassen's textures, Mayzee and Stained Linen. It also has the Nelle Nero action, Warm Up. The leaves don't really look like oak leaves, rather more like holly leaves and just as prickly. Sure enough though, they are from a California oak.

Keeping with the theme of love, I decided to capture some heart bokeh while shooting some leaves that were starting to turn.

This photo also has two of Kim's textures, Mayzee and Luminous. I've been rather fond of the Mayzee texture lately : )

Just as I was getting ready to edit some photos for this post I received Kim's new texture, The Ladder, so I had to give it a go. I really liked the results.

This has a bit of an abstract background and I really like the painterly effect Kim's textures gave it. I used Mayzee and Serendipity.

I love playing around with different techniques in photography, so it was fun combining heart bokeh with textures. For anyone not familiar with how to make heart or shaped bokeh, when I have more time this weekend I will post some links I used to make it, and some tips I learned along the way. Until then...

Happy (Belated) Texture Tuesday!

Textures -n- Actions for Texture Tuesdays

Well, I've just discovered "actions" and I had a lot of fun playing around with them this weekend, along with Kim's textures for Texture Tuesdays pics. The first one I am posting has Kim's new Thursday texture and one of the The Pioneer Woman actions, but i don't remember which :o/

I tried it in b/w and liked it too, so I am posting both

I bought these Chinese lanterns a year ago and finally got around to photographing them. They look lovely in my little thrift store vase with Kim's Mayzee texture and Nelly Nero's Autumn Vintage action

here is a darker version with Kim's Subtly Yours texture and Nelly Nero's Antique Overlay action

Finally, here are a couple of pics on the brighter side : )

Kim's Trust texture and The Pioneer Woman action, Slight Lighten, i think

and this one has Kim's Love in Layers texture and The Pioneer Woman's Slight Lighten action (this one I know :)

All these are from pictures I took over the summer for a project, but did some editing with the new techniques I learned in Kim's Essentials class that just wrapped up. For the project, I decided I wanted to take some pictures to make note cards so i could give them to friends and family as gifts. So I scoured thrift stores for small vases and bottles, picked summer flowers, and took pictures of them with my 50mm lens. I've had my 50mm lens for two years and just discovered how wonderful it is. Then i combined my pictures with the wonderful textures from Kim Klassen, and now the actions from the The Pioneer Woman and Nelly Nero. I'm having a blast! Happy Texture Tuesday : )

P.S. While I am having a blast using the actions I downloaded, it wouldn't have been possible without the help of Texas Chicks (see link below). They've posted a video showing how to add the actions to the Elements editing programs. I have Elements 9, but i followed the directions for Elements 7 & 8 and it worked just fine. I still can't believe how easy it was! Thanks a million Texas Chicks!
http://www.texaschicksblogsandpics.com/the-pioneer-woman/