It’s Week 10 of the online course I’m taking with Kim Klassen (Beyond Beyond) and we were encouraged to just play and create this week. I used Kim’s new texture “subtly yours” on this image. I was drawn to the way the grasses were illuminated by the beautiful early evening light. I love images where the impact comes as much or more from the light and shape than the colour.
Happy Easter to those who celebrate. Hope everybody has a delightful long weekend…
From a distance, it looked like an ordinary swimming pool, except, except…
I looked at it in a certain light at a certain time from a certain angle, and it was extraordinary…
Sharing today with Tuesday Muse.
Created for Beyond, Beyond with Kim Klassen. Processed using Kim’s “violet” and “isobel” textures.
I have always loved clouds. I love that they are always changing and moving. They don’t get bogged down — they just move on. This morning the sky was clear blue when I looked up. Later on, it was covered with small puffs of cloud. Now it is clear blue again.
When I was a girl, I was in Girl Guides (same as Girl Scouts in the U.S.) I was really into getting badges for baking and orienteering and making fires and stuff. One of my favorites was meteorology. We had a neighbour, Mr. Brown, who was a meteorologist at the airport for Montreal. He kindly offered to teach us what we needed to know for the badge. We learned all the names of the different cloud formations – cirrus, cumulous, nimbus and all the permutations and combinations.
Now as someone who lives on a boat part of the year, I spend a fair amount of time looking up at the sky. Knowing what the weather is doing is an important way to keep safe.
Sometimes our internal weather is stormy. It can help to remember that we are not our turbulent emotions and our troubled thoughts. At our essence, we are like the pure blue sky beneath all the weather — still, calm and care-free.
Finally, in honour of my father, mother and sister and a memorable trip we took to the Bahamas in the seventies, here’s Joni Mitchell singing Both Sides Now. Enjoy.
What better lunch on St. Patrick’s Day than Irish Soda Bread? It’s a bit different making it on a sailboat, but just as delicious…
Happy St. Paddy’s Day! Today, we’re all Irish.
Hutchinson Island beach
(Processed with Kim’s “Violet”.)
Linking to Kim Klassen’s Texture Tuesday, Wise Words edition and Tuesday Muse.
View of Manatee Pocket from the canal beside the marina.
It so often happens that I want to get more into my image than I can, especially when I’m around waterscapes. It occurred to me that I could use the panorama feature of Photoshop to capture some wider vistas. So I decided to do a bit of experimentation earlier this evening.
This image is composed of the following two stitched together.
24 mm
24 mm
It’s vital to keep the exposure and focus and white balance exactly the same in both images to make this work. You need to overlap anywhere from 20 to 40%. And the alignment is critical of course, which is not that easy, even with a tripod. But it’s quite fun to press the photomerge button and see the images combine into one. Now I need to get out there and get some more practice with larger panos…
Here are some easy-to-follow tips from Scott Kelby on creating panoramas.
Back home, I love trees that blossom — magnolias, cherry trees, apple trees, plum trees and crabapple trees. I love trying to capture the delicacy of their small blossoms. The other day I saw a tree in blossom that reminded me of a magnolia, but it wasn’t. It was blossoming with no leaves (like a magnolia), but it had a thick waxy bark, unlike any tree I’m familiar with.
I spotted this beauty in the yard of one of the houses bordering the marina. I didn’t know what it was so I asked the very friendly homeowner, a retired physician. He offered me a piece of the tree to take home but he couldn’t remember the name of it. He referred me to his wife, who told me that it was a frangipani and that its flowers are used to make leis in Hawaii.
She had three different specimens in her yard, each with a different colour flower: pink, yellow and white. She was generous is allowing me to take all kinds of photos of the tree and she offered me a bud to take with me. It has the most divine fragrance — sweet and light and not at all cloying. These trees usually blossom later in the spring, but the unusual and variable weather here in Florida this winter has confused them and they’re budding early.
I felt the sweet, soft buds and blossoms lent themselves to a dreamy, painterly French Kiss texture.
If you’d like to learn more about this tree (Plumeria), click here.
I’m living on a sailboat at a marina right now. This is one of my neighbours…Ms. Ibis…
For other marina shots, please click on the image.
Click on the image for more details…
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