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

These are some photos from a recent trip to the Tin Horn Creek Winery in Oliver, BC. 

When we were in Vancouver someone showed us these amazing trees.  They look like trees because they are so tall but at the same time they look like a form of cacti.  I was told they are called Spider Monkey Trees but when I went to do this post I googled "Spider Monkey Tree" to get some information on them and came up with nothing.  So I really do not know what these are officially called but they really were a unique tree so I decided to post the photos here.  If anyone does know what these are please let me know!

I knew it had been quite a long time since I had done a blog post but I didn't realize quite how long until today.  So much has happened in my life and blogging just hasn't been on the forefront.  But I am hoping to change that.  Today I am going to share more of the photos I took on our visit to Vancouver in September.  I did share a number of the Stanley Park photos but Vancouver is such a beautiful city (when it isn't raining) so I have a lot more to share.  Here are few more favorites.

Last weekend we were in Edmonton visiting family and we spend Saturday afternoon at the horse races at Northlands Park.  It was a great afternoon, sunny and warm, wine, good food and even better company.  I managed to get a few shots in of the horses.  They were so beautiful and lean.  I was actually surprised how well the shots of them in action turned out.  Here are a few for you to sample.

Here is my submission for this week's Texture Tuesday challenge over at Kim Klassen's Cafe.  The challenge was to use any texture with a photo showing your interpretation of orange.  Yes, I do realize a flower is not an overly creative use of an orange prompt but my love of flowers and flower photos won out.  So here it is...

It doesn't actually look like there is a lot of texture added to this photo but there is.  First I added a layer of Kim's Pumpkin Grunge to the photo and set the blending mode to Hue.  This brought out the color of the flower but gave a nice sepia hue to the rest of the photo, I then removed about half of the texture from the greenery on the left to bring back in some of it's color.  Then to blend it all I added another layer of Pumpkin Grunge and set the blending mode to soft light at about 22%.

Last weekend we were in Vancouver to visit family.  The weather was gorgeous and Vancouver is such a beautiful city in the sun.  We decided to head to Stanley Park for a walk around the sea wall and some flower photography.  Unfortunately my memory card ended up full and I didn't get nearly the photos I wanted but here are a bunch of photos that show just how beautiful this area is.

A couple weekends ago I followed my friend to the barn to take some photos of her horses.  I thought they might make an interesting although challenging subject and that it would be good photography practice for me.  Horses are hard to photograph because they are big and long, at least that is my take on them anyway.  So my idea was not to try too hard to get the whole horse but instead try to get some interesting shots of parts of them.  I took over 180 shots in total, here are a few that I have had time to edit.  I as sure I will do another post with more later.