My July Garden

These funky tiny coneflowers have brought a ton of delight this summer. They've bloomed a long time and still look good. I need to start dead heading so they'll last better until fall. They may have come back from seed, but I think they are the original plant.

I love them in blurry form.

I'll confess the bokeh was added. It's from Pretty Presets, their Luminous Set.

My pink/purple cone flowers seeded out. None of the originals survived.

(iPhone)

Fortunately the red/orange cone flowers seeded out all over and I've transplanted some of them to the front beds.

I guess a lot of things came up volunteer this year. This is a purple verbena variation that gets quite tall. It came up right in the middle of my flagstone path and because it wasn't coming up anywhere else I just left it alone. (Added bokeh, don't you just love it? I think it makes the photo more magical.)

Our butterflies have been few and far between this year. I believe it's because the city has been spraying our mosquitos a lot. We're already well above the average rainfall for the year. 

I love this in monochrome because it makes him look transparent.

Of course I've had a plethora of zinnias.

My sunflowers always volunteer in the veggie garden. A bad storm wiped most of them out last month so the majority are laying on the ground.

You'll see a lot more sunflowers from me this month. The farmer down the road has a field in rare form this year and I've been out twice in the last 3 days. This morning I took my tripod with me and actually dressed nice for some selfies. I'm doing 31 days of Hipstamatic sunflowers on Instagram. Check it out, link in the side bar.

Texture Tuesday Sept 9

A quick Tuesday Texture, linking up with Kim Klassen.

Lightroom Preset from Pretty Presets, Pretty Pastels, Ethereal B&W. (before texture)

Textured with kk_gift, Kim's latest at reduced opacity, Overlay blend mode for a subtle sepia textured flavor.

I'm taking the black and white version to our local Camera Club tonight for 'Show and Tell', (and judgement) More of these people like HDR and lots of color and landscapes. I image this will be low on the list. LOL! But I don't care. It's me, and I'll do my art.

Have a blessed week!

Friday Finds -Grandma's Spoons

I had a wrestling match with Lightroom yesterday and am pleased to announce that I won. It just took awhile. (I believe I have a limp.) I had started a new catalog the first of 2013 but since my granddaughter was born in 2012 I decided I would export that year as a catalog from the old Lightroom and import it into the new one. I also moved everything to an external drive so I could take it to work and play in my spare time.
Everything has rocked along just fine until I decided to start deleting old Collections because the list was quite long. I was at work and noticed I had missing photos in some collections. Of course all were from 2012. This was aggravating because if I asked it to show me where it was in the library it took me to the photo. So how was it missing?
To make a long story short, I have an extra INternal drive that replaced the dvd drive so it's like an external built in. Lightroom was pointing me to folders on that drive that I had backed up there. I go home to find the same thing. It's pointing me to a folder on my hard drive. It's hard to explain but I ended up throwing all those files in the trash and redirecting Lightroom to the correct folder on the external. whew!!!! Now the kicker is that those 'older' collections aren't linked to those photos anymore.  Oh well, I probably needed to get rid of them anyway.
On to a happier note… It's time for Friday Finds at Kim's blog.
A prior lesson in Be Still class was to photograph spoons from different angles of light. My memory told me I had some of my Great grand-mother's spoons tucked away somewhere. (actually they were right under my nose neatly wrapped with a piece of 50 year old scotch tape) A perfect set of 4 and 2 other strange ones. I decided to use the odd one first, possibly a sugar spoon or perhaps it was used for jam.

I decided the others photographed better.

Another thing I found this week was this cool coffee bean sack. You'll see it used for a lot more backdrops in the future. Thanks you Viv for this idea. I've had the old bottle for a long time. It deserves to be in more photos too. I used a 2 Lil Owls texture. You can see my layers panel below.

App Happy 5-14

It's App Happy Wednesday over at Barb's. Come over and check out what everyone's doing on their mobile edits.
A little tour of my Instagram feed the past few days.
I made 2 versions of this in DistressedFx then used a soft light blend mode in Image Blender to achieve this.

If memory serves me right, this was done using Vintique. Although I may have used PicGrunger too.

You'll just have to get used to the all the peony photos this week. Two Snapseed edits of this close up.

Speaking of Snapseed….I couldn't resist this old church done in black and white. My friend just got a best of show with a shot of this church that she HDR-ed. I haven't seen it yet… It's at the Garden and Art Center in the West Texas Photographic Society Show. My track record has been great this past year but I didn't place at all in this one. I got a few oohs and aahs as I turned in my photos and that's enough to spur me on.

And more Snapseed….. There is a 'gasoline' museum halfway between Taos and Santa Fe but it was closed on Sunday when we made the trek. That didn't keep me from getting out and snapping a few.

And what would Mother's Day be without a card with a watercolored peony on it? Waterlogue and Rhonna Designs.

Beyond Beyond Day 2 Part one

A photo supplied by Kim and we were to edit however we wanted.  I decided I was up to the challenge for a  B&W. 

 Her original.

My layers panel.
I used the channel to make my B&W.
Added her texture 0101.
Merged my layers to do some cloning and healing.
Played with the text which is Faustina Font, available here.