Easter Quail

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.

 

Gratitude

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!

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

And of course I’m grateful for autumn- my favorite season!

Blue Trees

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!