A New Day, A Different Way The creative and photographic endeavours of a woman trying to add color and beauty to her world.

Kat over at The Kat Eye View of the World is organizing what she is hoping to be a massive art postcard swap.  The mediums can be almost anything as long as you can put it on a post card. Photography, painting, poetry, typography, jewelry, sculpture, knitting, cooking, illustration - you name it.

Her goal is to get at least 200 people from around the world participating.  So if you want to share some of your art and get a chance to experience the art of people from around the world I think is a great event to take part in.  One of the things I enjoy most about the blogging world is the friends and people I have been able to meet that I simply would never have come into contact with otherwise and how I have become to see a number of those people as friends.  Check out the details on Kat's blog here.

On Thursday's Monica over at Pixel Perfect hosts a blog hop.  It is an opportunity for other photographers to link up their edited photos and show the power of editing software and the difference it can make in our photos.  Here is my before and after for the blog hop.

I thought the original of this photo was pretty boring, in Photoshop Elements I removed a bird off in the distance which just looked like a black speck and did a levels adjustment and then I added a texture to the photo and set the blending mode to multiply, then I removed the texture from the two hillsides in the background so that they remained clearer in the photo.

I think it made for a brighter more interesting photo.  Any thoughts?

A few weeks ago I had been wandering around they side of the road on the windswept side of the lake taking pictures of willow tree buds.  Of course I was looking up at the tree now down at my feet.  All of sudden I had this sharp pain in my shins and I looked down to see what I thought was about a dozen huge green burns stuck to my jeans and even into the leather of my shoes.  I didn't want to touch them so I shook my legs and used my camera strap to get them off and then headed home.  By the time I got home by shins and feet where burning.  I told my husband about my encounter and he assured me there was no such thing as poisonous burrs. 

So the other day we were both out for a drive and I pointed out the area where we had been and he said no wonder the pokes stung me that it was likely cactus and not burrs.  I had heard we had cactus here in the Okanagan but I had never seen any, not that I had been looking.  So this weekend I drove back to the same spot to look again, at the ground this time not the tree and sure enough...cactus.  I photographed the willow tree again as well but I was very careful where I stepped.  

I have purchased the book "Digital Expressions" by Susan Tuttle from Amazon.  I have to say it is a really interesting book and I like what she does with a lot of the works.  Basically taking photos and making them into digital artworks.  It isn't as easy as I thought it might be and a lot of the type of photos I take don't seem to lend themselves to this it seems but I was playing with these railcar graffiti images last night and trying to manipulate them to look a bit like paintings.  I am not sure I succeeded but here is the end result anyway.  I have to keep reminding myself that this is a learning process.

I captured three different shots of the buds on this tree.  I think they all look beautiful.  I may actually print these out and frame them.  Spring seems to have stalled around here the last couple weeks but these buds give me hope it is still on it's way.

This is round two for a posting I did a couple months ago.  These murals line our entire downtown area and are actually quite a tourist attraction.  There are so many I could probably do a posting on them every day for week but that might be a bit boring.  But for today I thought a post would be fun.  These particular murals line one entire alleyway.  I think it is kind of cool that they think to line an alley which doesn't actually get a lot of traffic with such amazing artwork.  Some of these are taken from quite an angle but I couldn't help that with the alley, there wasn't always a lot of access.  I think my favorite is the couple with their arms around each other. What is yours?

I was so excited this morning when I received an email from Kat over at Kat's Eye View that she had featured one of my photos over on her blog.  That is the first time another blog has featured on of my photo's and it was very exciting for me.  It is the photo below that I posted on Saturday.  If you get a chance pop over to her blog to take a look.  The link is http://www.kateyeview.com/2011/04/share-your-view-waiting-to-click.html. 

Again I am participating in Kim Klassen's texture Tuesday.  Kim's textures are amazing, they do such wonderful things for your photos.  If you are looking for photo inspiration you should check out her site.  She does some amazing stuff and has some great courses.  

I used the same two textures for each of the photos below and I love how they create different effects.  Using Photoshop Elements I added Paper Stained Grunge set to multiply and Mad Love set to soft light, the only difference was I used varying degrees of opacity for the different photos but the textures and the blending modes were the same for each.  Please let me know what you think of the effects. 

I don't know why these dead dried leaves continue to catch my eye but they do.  I think there is still something beautiful in their muted colors and the dried shapes.  Also they fact that they were able to brave the winter and still exist is amazing in itself.  Here are a bunch of beauties that I found on Saturday when I went for a walk along the creek. 

Today was the first time in about three weeks I have actually had the time and the energy to get out there with my camera.  I actually used three different cameras, my usual Olympus SLR and then I played around for a while with my Holga and took a couple Polaroids.  The Polaroids are a bust, I am not sure what I am doing wrong, maybe I just need more practice.  Of course I have no idea what the Holga picture look like yet because I have to wait to develop them, perhaps they will make up a future blog post.  I haven't yet actually developed any from my Holga so it will be quite a surprise I am sure. 

I spotted this little guy as I was driving a long a side road today, I almost missed him but I caught sight of him out of the corner of my eye.  It took a bit of waiting and standing very still before he would come out again after he first saw me but eventually he decided I wasn't going to eat him and posed nicely for me.