Do you ever spend hours whiling away your time playing with your photos? I just did. This wasn’t even a photo I especially liked but I spent so much time with it that I felt I should post some of the results. These are all just using one texture layer (Kim Klassen’s Sweet Treat Sample) with different types of opacity. I like #3, where I used luminosity (its tonal ranges remind me of a fine platinum print as opposed to a regular gelatin silver print), and #4, where I used color burn, best.
CLICK PHOTO TO ANIMATE!
I wasn’t planning to animate that but when I woke up this morning I had dreamt that I did (of all stupid things to dream about) so I felt I should.
under the mesquite
tree sit you, me, and a bee
searching for nectar
Funny, that photo looks much better enlarged (click on it) than it does like this. I wonder why. Want to see worse haiku or generate some? That second one is pretty fun.
Filed under: Arizona | Tags: Arizona, Flora, Freshly Pressed, Sedona, Travels
I found this old postcard of Cathedral Rock while we were in Sedona last week so I scanned it. Okay, not really, but you probably knew that. It’s another of my old postcard creations, using texture and rounded edges, that I find so entertaining. Okay, here are a few more Sedona pics. I have the feeling that they sort of all look the same to any viewer after awhile so, after this post, I’ll take a little Sedona break before I post any more.
This is Courthouse Butte below.
Can you see the Eagle Rock above? Here it is, closer, naturally-occurring:
The clouds did cooperate that day.
See the rock formations on the right-hand side of the above photo?
Here they are, in the middle, a little larger. And here they are, below, closer-up.
The two large ones, together, are called the Two Sisters. The one to the left of those is Madonna and Child.
I could never get tired of looking at all of the red rocks…I think. But you might be so we will revisit Sedona a little later.
Well, okay, one more…
Update: This post was Freshly Pressed on 9.26.11! Thank you, WordPress.
If you’ve been there or seen pictures of it, you know this is Sedona, Arizona. “God created the Grand Canyon but He lives in Sedona.” I always think about that every time I see Sedona again. There’s no other place that looks like it…so RED.
We went on another road trip last Friday, less than two weeks after our last road trip to Payson. We always say we should visit the beautiful closeby places in Arizona more often and then wind up going about once a year. Well, maybe we’ve turned over a new leaf…hopefully. The destination of this trip was really to re-visit Cottonwood but, once we were there, knowing we were only 16 miles from Sedona, it was too hard to resist. We drove through Sedona a couple of years ago but we hadn’t stopped and spent any time there in awhile.
This is Bell Rock below:
All of the red rocks are fragile.
This is how red it is.
This is Cathedral Rock below. Both Cathedral Rock and Bell Rock are energy vortices (although they refer to them as vortexes in Sedona).
There are a lot of wealthy (and famous) people who have homes in Sedona. You can see some of them scattered about the landscape above. If I had the $$, I would have a house there, too. But this is not your typical Sedona home (below) and I guess it has caused an uproar in Sedona. From the gorgeous Chapel of the Holy Cross, a big tourist destination, this is now one of the views and is more the topic of conversation than the actual chapel. Click to see all the opulence.
It supposedly has 44,000 square feet of living space, its own observatory, lush gardens and waterfalls, a koi pond on the left, and cost $24 million to build. It was briefly on the market for $29 million but I think the original owner still resides there. He is a Romanian who holds numerous European and U.S. patents for medical devices. Can you say “conspicuous consumption”? Something about the fact of its location makes it offensive (to me), although I understand if you have that kind of money, you’d want a house in a beautiful location, too. At least the color is right but the style isn’t and it just seems “over the top” (in my opinion).
I hope it won’t be too boring but I have plenty more Sedona photos to post that will show up in the next few days.
Poor Romeo got stuck in our pine tree today. I heard some desperate meowing and looked up, not expecting it to be him. He’s our next-door neighbors’ cat but he seems to like the canned food we serve better than whatever he gets at home so he is here usually.
See that black blob halfway up?
He made it down a few minutes later, falling the last 10 feet or so. He seemed a little stunned but uninjured. Romeo gets along with most of our outdoor cats except Svengali. Since WB died, Svengali has sort of assumed cat-in-charge position but not as loyally or sweetly as WB did. He still leaves during the day for hours at a time. Svengali has long fur that was matted badly in the back. A few weeks ago, he had a spa day and got his hindquarters shaved. It looks pretty silly from certain angles.
Grady is a feral outdoor kitty that is becoming tamed. She likes to be petted a little bit now and laid down and let me pet her this morning. See her tipped ear? Most of our ferals are ear-tipped and a couple of other non-ferals, too, but the vet forgot to do 2 of them while they were being neutered/spayed.
And then there’s her sister, Stripey, who has actually let me pick her up a couple times but other times won’t come near us. Click on Stripey’s photo below to animate her. I did my first animated gifs today, very primitive as you will see since I only had two photos to use and didn’t use a tripod. The key: a tripod.
Haha. I can’t seem to slow the looping down either. I did it in Photoshop Elements 9, very simple. Do you have any pointers? Want to see another? Click on Abbey below for her animation. This one might make you dizzy. That green stuff by her back feet is catnip and the wall is dirty because she lays against it all the time (how embarrassing!).
Yes, a tripod next time, for sure. And here is Google, just looking silly, with no animation.
