May 14 - Groups

Groups of birds - of course!!
These Turkey Buzzards had their wings hung out to dry on a misty summer morning
on the California coast.

Closer to home our group (gang?) of boys in the hen house always had to climb higher than the girls
Showing off? or staying away from the fierce mama chooks?

May 13 - Gross

Gross - disgusting, awful ... my daughter can't understand my fascination with fungi :) ... although she did say that this jelly fungi (tremella) was 'pretty' until I pointed out that it had lots of tiny slugs living on it ... then it was 'gross' again - sigh - I think it's great!

Not sure if the second image will show the slugs - they are tiny - all the little black bits are tiny slugs. I have seen them on an orange jelly fungi as well, so I can only conclude that it is a habitat for them.

So... building on 'gross' here's a picture of another fungi she hates ... Xylaria, also known as 'dead man's fingers' and for good measure of gross - an inkcap (coprinus), which autodigests itself with enzymes that cause it to liquefy and dissolve...

May 12 - Glow

Glow ... the huge moon the other night was an opportunity to see what the Canon compact could do, handheld, from our front garden. Granted, we have no ambient light from other buildings, so the stars here are spectacular. Here's the result, with a little high pass sharpening and contrast. 

Once I had the basic photo I ran it through some PS filters just to see what happened and surprisingly 'fresco' gave an abstract glow result that I really liked.

May 05 - Fuzzy

Fuzzy fungi today - this fungi felt like velvet and was a rich caramel brown colour

April 23 - Fluffy

Still playing with borders today with these 'fluffy' subjects - a nesting box of chicks just a few days old (with a 'page curl' effect) and a tiny friar bird with downy fluff still on his head and a displacement map border with embossed edges.

April 22 - Flowers

There's a bonus with the flowers today - I have to have a twist to the theme or there would be just too much to choose from ;) so my flowers have bonus bird, bees and butterfly. Still experimenting with frames, these are simple bevel and emboss ones.

April 21 - Flight

Fight - and another experiment :) One of our gorgeous young wedge tailed eagles in the sky above our farm. Best viewed bigger.

April 20 - First Class

The Qantas First Class lounge at Sydney airport is an interesting architectural statement with oak dividers to separate various areas and provide some privacy. We managed a visit here before an international flight and the food, service and facilities are superb. Then we had to get into our regular seats on the plane - luckily in a row with lots of leg room, but certainly not 'first class'!!

April 19 - Fire

Fire! one of our campfires in the scrub - need a breather from all the composites :)

April 18 - Feminine

Diana, goddess of the hunt, moon and birth - twin of Apollo and connected to animals and the woodland.

This is another experiment :) I thought Diana standing in her niche at the museum was not appropriate for a goddess, so I found her a woodland and made some mist and sent the light of a full moon filtering down on her through the leaves. Another fun project and I have included the original sooc images. The tree is beside our house, Diana is in Russia :) I like the result. It's done in several layers - first I duplicated Diana and erased her background - a bit tricky because she is a similar colour, then I added a layer with the tree underneath her and adjusted the relative sizes. Once that was done, added a layer above both in orange, set to overlay and adjusted opacity so that it was just a glow. Then a white gradient for fog, wiped back to make the light beams, then I added a vignette and changed it all to B&W then adjusted opacity of this layer just enough to give it warmth - Feminine - done!

April 17 - Fear

Fear - this one was a challenge when deciding what image to use ... so I decided on stretching skills with another composite.

I'm generally OK with snakes but Aus has the most deadly ones and some of them live here on our farm. I took a close up (with a long lens) of this eastern brown snake - the simple name belies the aggressiveness and deadliness of this reptile which is said to be the second most venomous snake in the world. This beastie was on the grass near our back door, so of course, safe inside and fear under control, I got out the camera! I haven't seen it since and with winter coming I'm hoping it just leaves for good.

Thinking about the theme for today I fished out the images and cropped one closely to just around the eye - added a few colour layers to give the right 'mood' to the image, then found a quote and layered it on top. Flattened and served up as my offering for today's theme.

It was creepy just working on this image ... I'm OK with pythons and such - even red-bellies are fine but these snakes give me the chills.

Ron's suggestion sent me back to the snake file to add the images above - the 'original' eye and one of about 2/3 of the snake - I guess from when it went across the top of the steps that it was at least 1.8 metres long (about 6')

April 14 - Fashion

When Catherine the Great of Russia was crowned, the fashion was for enormous, heavily embroidered gowns - now I know why all the doorways in the palace were so big!! This is one of her gowns - I think being a ruler of the Russian Empire must have been hard work - even just getting dressed is a challenge I wouldn't like to attempt...

April 13 - Far from home

We were definitely far from home on April 13, bushwalking in the Warrumbungles, so here are some photos from Friday 13th. Those of you who are interested in geology will probably enjoy - I think I need to learn to do panoramas next. The bunny perched on the rocks was a survivor of Easter 2011, sadly he didn't survive the return hike from the tops... I suppose it was an unlucky day for him.

April 12 - Fantasy

This is one of the stretches yes? This year I wanted to learn how to use photoshop so that I can do more than just auto-adjust - and it's been quite a learning curve so far, with layers and filters becoming easier and learning new things like making brushes and displacement maps. So much more to learn though - so when the themes came to fantasy I decided to take 3 images from 3 different places and merge them into a fantasy picture.

I have shown the three elements (sooc) and the final image - not genius I admit, but it was a learning experience. First - the background - a sunset close to home. Then some trees - I chose some sculptural looking ones from the hills in Rome - I call them 'art deco' trees. I removed the background using the background eraser tool - Magic that! then the final layer - some huge Trolls from Iceland - in the main street of Akureyri there are these fabulous larger-than-life Troll figures (well they are probably the right size for Trolls) so I de-backgrounded them too and layered them on top. Then I adjusted sizes and gave the whole lot a colour filter, then a graduated black layer set to overlay blended their feet in. At the last minute I added some bird brushes in the sky. A learning experience and lots of fun.

April 11 - Fancy

Our Tawny Frogmouth was most unimpressed with the fancy decoration we held up so that she could have a Christmas portrait taken - she'd just had a shower and was still a bit damp - not feeling fancy at all :) We forgot to do it again when she was dry and fluffy.

April 10 - Famous

Famous in Australia anyway ;) we were lucky enough to get tickets to one of Powderfinger's farewell concerts at the last minute (and sent all the kids mms texts to prove that we went). After being part of Aussie music for 20 years the band made the decision to stop - but hey, you never know in the music world - old bands are always springing surprises with 'revival' concerts...

April 9 - Family

Found this little family of oystercatchers on the beach of an island in the Bay of Islands NZ . The parents kept calling to the littlies to keep up, the babies kept stopping to explore seaweed and such. Too cute!

April 8 - Faith

At the Vatican there were many on a pilgrimage to visit a place special to them and others who just wanted to see the spectacular cathedral. This young man was honoured to make a public expression of his faith when he met Cardinal Arinze of Nigeria (I hope the name is correct, the Italian woman standing beside me identified him).

April 7 - Faces

We were hiking at Easter and went to one of our favourite places - the Warrumbungles in NSW. Here are my 'faces' for today's theme - rock faces of course! You can only see this view of the 'breadknife' from the Grand High Tops walk - a long steep hike to the high centre of what was a huge volcano - worth the sore muscles for the view! The breadknife is one of the most famous formations in the National Park, a trachyte dyke that is only a few metres wide, but about 600m high and runs for about 900m. On this walk you come up beside the massive wall and after climbing even higher for a fabulous view, the trail goes down again on the other side.

The other 'faces' were much easier to photograph - a sunrise walk along the fire trail near our campsite showed the moon behind split rock, with the rock faces lit by the rising sun.

April 6 - Eyes

Catching up again after a trip away over the Easter break. Found 'eyes' in a walk around the coastal rocks at low tide - they look pretty evil to me - what do you think?