Color February Pink

My February submissions to the Colors of 2013 with Eva Richi Studio have been posted! I went with a vintage feel this past month. You can check out my photos here.

Same Old Sundays Week 7

I have posted a new weekly photo for Same Old Sundays but this week I had some visitors! Nice to see them come all the way back for some photos!

Another Same Old Sunday

I just posted Week 6 of Same Old Sundays.
http://catinocreations.blogspot.com/p/same-old-sundays.html

These photos are taken from my back yard in Southlake, Texas over looking the neighbor's Longhorn Pasture. Sometimes they even show up for a photo shoot!

Week 5 Added to Same Old Sundays

I just added week 5 to Same Old Sunday section. A new scene in the longhorn cow pasture to view.

Colors of 2013: Januray

COLORS of 2013: JANUARY

Flash in the Night - Fright!

As part of my participation in the Ellenburg Photography Project 52 (http://www.flickr.com/groups/ellenburgphotography-project52/ ) we had an assignment for the week on the theme "SPOOKY". There is a dead tree down the street from me that I always think about photographing every time I drive past it. This was my chance for an excuse to stop and do just that.  I waited for the sun to set and head out. It was almost getting too dark to shoot the  tree against a darkening purple sky.

Here is my light, going, going, gone....

I almost never use a flash and I had to resort to using the flash, which in the end turned out just fine. There were many moths and bugs flying around and getting in the shot and round specks of light or "spooky spirit halos". Sure, that's what I will call them. I ended up using this shot:

Can you see the bug halos? No, my lens is not dirty! This shot was ok, but I wanted it to be spookier. I had taken some photos in a local graveyard last week, so I dug out this one to merge the two together after resizing it to the correct proportion for the tree:

Using the stamp tool in PaintShop Pro, I copied the headstone to an area under the tree and it ended up like so:

I know this was not the greatest copy or cut and paste job but I knew that I was going to heavily texturize it, so it did not matter much. The texture I chose was called "Rebirth (cool)" by Joel Olive and I got it as a free download from his website. Here is his website http://www.joelolives.com/?cat=4  You can join the Texture Club for $10 a month to get many textures, or sample some of his downloads to try out. Here is the texture I used:

I added the texture as it's own layer and changed the opacity to about 50% or so. It ended up looking like this:

I merged the two layers and played with the contrast and brightness until I got an effect that I wanted. I ended up dropping the brightness by -25% or so and uppinng the contrast by about 35% or so. This is what I ended up with after slapping on my copyright stamp:

Oh so spooky with that glowing headstone. Seems like a moth halo got in the photo as well! Even Spookier!
And now I must tell a joke that my Dad always says when we pass a grave yard. "Do you know why they put a fence around a graveyard? Because people are dying to get in!"

Oldie but goody for Halloween. Have fun playing with the flash in the dark! Happy Halloween! Until next time...

Going for a Ride

My husband and I went for a long ride the other day to check out some areas of North Texas. Of course I took my camera with me!  We went up North of Lake Ray Roberts, twisting and turning and kicking up dust through the long winding, dry dry dry dirt roads.

It was a beautiful blue sky day and if I had a wide angle lens instead of my point and shoot Sony, I may have been able to make it look like Wyoming. Not that Wyoming is any better than Texas...

We were actually surprised at how some of the landscape had many trees and there were actually hills! Texas hills, but little hills and valleys none the less.

There were plenty of cows to photograph. And Texas Longhorns of course. Some of them even posed for me while lazing in a field of burnt out wild flowers.

It was hard not to imagine living on a ranch out in the middle of this true "Texas Country" and think about what one might do...like raise goats!

Milk, Cheese, Goat Meat? Actually it was quite an eye opener. I don't know if I would like being so solitary. Maybe I could try it out for a little bit and see how I could do without a Michael's or JoAnn's Fabric store or a Hobby Lobby close by...

Just as the sun was setting and we were just about home  I manage to snap some "Wyoming" big sky shots of Texas landscapes and turn them into some masterpieces with a little texturing magic. (I use an old version of PaintShop Pro for my photo finishing. )

I started with this shot of cows grazing in a field and I cropped off most of the field to the horizon was not cutting the photo in half. Newbie mistake! Also a mistake easy to make while snapping photos from a moving car...

I then decided that I wanted to use this photo as a large poster size piece so I  s-t-r-e-a-c-h-e-d it.

But then my cows stretched so I had to copy them back in from the original with a stamp tool and get rid of the stretched cows. Not to worry, it didn't hurt the cows at all. They couldn't feel it.

I used the above texture from my favorite free texture guy at  http://shadowhousecreations.blogspot.com and pulled the opacity down to about 65% from what I remember. This time I used the eraser and stamped some of the texture out. I did it this way because I wanted to keep that fantastic old tin type frame around the edges. In this photo below you can see where I am just starting to erase out the texture layer from over the sky area to let the "big sky" show through.

This is a look at the final piece. It has a wonderful rustic old time Texas feel to it. It will be available as a 12 x 36 poster size.

These are two other shots from the same drive. I put the same textured finishes to them.

And here is one of the prints on acid free watercolor paper signed and framed. It looks like an old artist color print! I mean an old color print from an artist!

These will be available in my online store: CatinoCreations.Etsy.com  Please stop by and have a look at my other creations as well.

And until the cows come home and we have the next great adventure.... here is  the sun finally setting on the day...

See what I mean about "Big Sky"? ~ Michele