I have so many Bodie photos still to edit from our photo group’s trip last fall. I submitted the image below for this week’s virtual class.

I have so many Bodie photos still to edit from our photo group’s trip last fall. I submitted the image below for this week’s virtual class.

Last night as we were getting ready for our Easter dinner, I spotted a quail kind of hunkering down in a clay pot near the patio. I grabbed my camera and took a series of photos through the window as he fluffed his feathers to warm himself in the wind. When I looked through the resulting photos, I realized that he had gradually made himself fluffier during the quick photo session. My photographer friend, Carol, had recently informed me that a fat bird is called a BORB and a fluffy one a FLOOF. So my Easter quail had transformed himself from a borb to a borb that is also a floof in a matter of seconds- your Fun Facts for today!
This was a fairly mundane image, so I decided to try some creative edits to create an image to submit today to my photo group. I have been working on creating textures for the last few months, so I made a custom background for the quail, starting with a copy of the original image and adding a painted texture and a Topaz Impression chalk drawing filter. I finished it off with a clipping mask border, another skill I’m working on.
I’ve been having a lot of fun creating my own textures using paint and ink- and old cookie sheets! The textured background in this photo was created from an intentional camera movement photo of flowers layered with one of my other textures. The possibilities are endless!
For the month of November, our church has been having us keep track of all the things we are grateful for- writing them down and saying them out loud. I am grateful for my wonderful family and friends- and this month especially I am grateful for my brand new bionic knee and the promise of a more active and pain free lifestyle!
And of course I’m grateful for autumn- my favorite season!
I froze some flowers in water a few weeks ago before we left for California and had fun taking photos of them last week. This one was taken in multiple exposure mode.
Fireweed had just begun its bloom when we were in Alaska. I used a slow shutter speed with my iPhone to create this impressionist style image.
I was housebound for almost three weeks with a tenacious virus, and am glad to say that I seem to have recovered finally. I haven’t been out with my camera since our Holbrook trip, and as a result, have been pulling photos from the archives to edit and post here, the exception being the sunflowers and chair photos from last week. Next week, we will be in Alaska- and finally I will have some opportunities for photography!
When I’m sick, I tend only seem to have enough energy for Words With Friends and photo editing apps on my iPhone. Below is one of my favorite recent iPhone creations. I took the photo out the car window as we were approaching Prescott on the trip back from Southern California in March and then edited it last week on my phone. I cropped it heavily and layered it with several textures, playing with blend modes until it looked the way I wanted. I added one more texture to the trees in Photoshop- and voila!