Withered

So now we have snow. Although it's now lighter and not pitch-black in the evening, I'm not feeling overly delighted about. I guess I might be happy about it if I didn't know that it'll be there now for the next six months. Yes, it might melt away for a while, but it'll be back, and the melting away is almost worse - although I don't love it, I don't dislike snow as such, but I do dislike slushy roads, slippery roads, icy roads and streets.  Also this means we'll be ploughing and shovelling snow for months and months. Better Half already did the first take yesterday afternoon, and today it was my turn to start. Again, it's not too bad, I actually like it, when it's not too heavy and wet and there's not too much of it, but it's the fact that you have to clear the snow, whether or not you have the time or inclination, if you are to move at all…

I'm off work for almost a week now. Might perhaps get a challenge or two done? Today I cleared one: day 60 at BL. Before I got so far, however, I did some serious pruning in my photo archives from this and last year, and got rid of about a thousand photos, and am feeling awfully accomplished. I got myself Lightroom last month, and don't regret it - it made doing away with the photos so much easier, although I'm only just beginning to learn to use the program.

Anyway, day 60 challenge at Beyond Layers was to use some scripted textures and follow another recipe by Kim. I was not overly enthusiastic about using the scripts on top of the images as such, but I thought I could do something with them if I found the right image. (Read: a photo with enough white space, not green, like most of my non-winter pictures…) So I dug up a picture of leaves that I took about a month ago when rummaging in our old house. The leaves have effectively mummified - they have been standing on the window-sill of our old abandoned house since before we moved away from there, and that was ten years ago. I did slight modification in Lightroom and then followed Kim's recipe as such, until the scripted textures. The first scripted one, Sonnet 2, I blurred at 25 px Gaussian blur, to get only the tone from it, no text. Then I added Sonnet Magic at blend mode screen but turned down the opacity to 68% and masked out most of the script. I didn't add any photo filters, although that was part of the recipe, since I found that would have taken away all depth from my photo.

Withered

Resources:
- texture Sienna, Sonnet 2 & Sonnet Magic by Kim Klassen

Now to see if there'e enough for the birds to eat, when their last feeding rush for the evening starts. They have been crowding our feeding post ever since we started feeding them almost two weeks ago, and I have a feeling I need to do a refill, although I filled everything up to the brim in the morning.

Finding Fences

Day 52 challenge at BL was to go and find some fences. The idea was to find some interesting (somehow I think they were meant to be pretty?) fences and photograph them. Well, this made me dig into my archives for something not so much pretty but what actually was precisely what we did last autumn. We went looking for fences.

At the end of October, tired of the little girls always finding their way on the fields and disappearing there to hunt for heaven knows what, we finally decided it had to stop. We had fenced a sizable part of our property back when we moved here in the 1990s, but back then, we had
a) a large dog
b) many dandies
c) unrealistic ideas about the need for space
d) illusions of how much time we'd be able to dedicate to taking care of our yard.

Over the years, we kept repairing the fence here and there, but had already come to realise that we had fenced much more than was either necessary or practical. Parts of the fence stood in the middle of untouched old fields, pushing up fireweed and willow, parts were rotting in the wet ground by the brookside. So we went to the bushes to find the old fence and dig it up and move it so that it could be planted closer to our actual garden.

Not so easily done, the two of us toiled away with it for a good while, but   after a couple of weeks, just before the the ground frost set in, we finished the project. The fence had to be revisited and the posts banged in again in the spring, and we'll have to do the same every spring after the ground frost melts, but there's significantly less fence to take care of now.

Resources used:
- template 27 by myself
- paper Cloudbusting 05 by myself
- font SF Arch Rival by ShyFonts
- font Janda Elegant Handwriting by Kimberly Geswein
- font KG Call Me Maybe by Kimberly Geswein

A Tall Order

For day 50 at Beyond Layers we were asked to show where we live, and shoot landscapes in portrait format. I often do that, and originally I thought I'd pick something from the archives again.

But I didn't. For this challenge I actually didn't delve into my archives but instead took some time to go for a little walk to get some images of where I live. Not of the garden, not the doggies, but some shots on the riverside in the town centre.

As the opportunity more or less offered itself, I took it, and feel so good about it. About a month ago, I went to buy meat for the dogs from the truck the stops here every four weeks, and it was such a beautiful August evening. So instead of rushing home with the boxes of frozen meat in the boot of my car I took a few steps towards the river and took the first photos.

Riverside from Market Place

Process:
- ran action CoffeeShop 2020 by Rita @ The Coffee Shop Blog
- lowered layer opacity to 80% and masked out from the bottom
- applied texture Havana by Kim Klassen
- inverted texture colour and changed blend mode to 60% Color Dodge
- ran framing action Shadow by Chain

Then I grew even bolder - I drove a bit further along the riverside, parked the car for about ten minutes and walked to a park to take some photos towards the centre. I "wasted" perhaps a full fifteen minutes there, but it felt like a huge achievement. Which in a way it was, because I had taken a step out of my oh so well set ways.

Riverside Sunset

Process:
- straightened image in ACR
- corrected white balance in ACR
- ran action Fresh & Colourful by The Pioneer Woman
- ran framing action Shadow by Chain

Bookspine Poem

A quick post to catch up again, before I dash off.  Tuesdays are my busy days this autumn, but decided to post another picture, which I actually took and processed already in July, so that I can move it to my Done! folder.

Day 42 of BL was a challenge to create "bookspine poetry", that is, stack books so that their titles would make a "poem". You are supposed to read the book titles only, not the author's names.

In July, I took a quick look at our bookcases, dug up some books in English and piled them on our garden love seat. It was a 10-minute project, processing the photo took a bit longer, perhaps a quarter of an hour. I'm amazed I can make quick work of something!

Steps taken:
1 did some levels adjustment
2 added texture Pour Vous by Kim Klassen at hard light 45%
3 added frame: framing action White Frame V4 from Photographer's Toolkit 2 by WallStorm

Oh, and I read the "poem" with the following punctuation, but feel free to substitute your own.

Picture this
complete nonsense:
The hippopotamus,
birds, beasts and relatives
inside the Victorian home
discovering heraldry.
Through a glass, clearly
tears of the giraffe.

Yes, I meant it to be complete nonsense, but to me it sounded fine and made me giggle. I leave it to the reader to decide whether the poor giraffe was crying behind a window for not being included in the party or whether the whole merry bunch was raising glasses, realizing they were filled with giraffe tears. A sad story anyway, isn't it? ˆ--˜

Now off.  Must wake up the snoring dogs, kick them out and pack my stuff and dash for lessons.

Home again

Back at the computer again after a fabulous and wonderfully busy week.

On Thursday, 6th June, we left the doggies at the dog hotel and then me and M drove south to Järvenpää to attend the International Oriental Dance Festival there. M was busy, of course, first rushing off to do some dog judging training on Thursday evening and then having enrolled on altogether five courses during the weekend. For me it was a time of away-from-home-not-having-to-do-anything, in other words, holiday. We stayed at this nice peaceful hotel away from the town centre, with hares and squirrels and birds of many kinds right outside the window, and while M was on courses, I basked in the sun, listening to the birds and shooting photos and knitting. It was simply wonderful. The weather was fantastic all the time. In the evenings we went to see two Oriental Dance shows. The Friday show was something of a disappointment, and the Saturday show with 3,5 hours was simply too long, although most of the performers that day were top notch.

Schoolyard Folly

A folly or something on a schoolyard where I sat knitting in the warm sunshine. See my backpack and water bottle on the bench.

Resources used:
- texture 335 by Sirius-sdz
- framing action Simple by Chain

Then on Sunday we took the 500-odd-kilometre-drive back home, got the doggies home and I packed, since I was off again, had to be about 430 km south-west by 10 o'clock on Monday. So I got up at 3.45, drove off at 4.30 and picked my friends from the vocal ensemble up and headed southwards again, this time to a barbershop singing course.

It was another wonderful four days. We sang almost all our waking hours, when not having a meal. We worked really hard on quite a few new songs, and on our final day we gave a promenade concert of altogether nine songs. Our teachers, the barbershop quartet Carpe Diem, performed three songs in addition to ours, and it was all absolutely amazing. I just keep on hearing all the songs we sang together, they are ear-worming me one after another, and I don't mind a bit. I love it.

We drove back home on Thursday evening, singing, yes, but even more importantly, summing up our experiences from the course and planning the future.

Then on Saturday, there was another dog show to attend, this time only about 30 km from home. Me and M were working in the office, doggies travelled with us and happily snoozed in the car. It was a cool and cloudy day and we were fearing it would rain all day since that's what the weather forecasts had promised, but no. Just some drizzle early in the morning and then some in the afternoon. How lucky we were! It was only when we were driving back home that the rain began.

Now, since Sunday, I've been enjoying a flu. I'm sure I caught it from the other singers, since at least three of the tenors were ill during the course. But since I'm not working anyway at the moment, it's just a bore, nothing more. Just have to make sure I'll be ok again by the weekend, since I've promised to work in the traditional Midsummer dog show at the Arctic Circle.

At the Beyond Layers catch-up, for me it should be a week of quotes. I think I've stated before that I'm not really a quote person. At least not a great fan of inspirational quotes. Often they feel to me… either dry, flat or syrupy. Pasted-on or slightly icky. So I think I'll skip this challenge altogether.

Ice-Cream, Snow & Flowers

This is me all over. Here I'm trying to catch up with the Beyond Layers course, and yet I find myself watching the video Kim presented and trying the techniques not once, no, but three times. Really, am I so hopeless at making a quick work of something? But then, I'm supposed to be learning from this, and as we all know, repetitio mater studiorum est! Furthermore, I did what Kim suggested and tweaked her recipe for each image, discarding some layers and modifying others.

So, here are my takes for the day 34 challenge A Few Tips & Tricks to Try. The challenge included the use of the texture Chase and the use of a recipe Kim presented to us on video.

The first picture was taken on 9 May, 2010 at Keukenhof, Amsterdam. The flower is incredible, a tulip called Ice-Cream, with a good reason.

Tulip Ice-Cream

Resources used:
- texture Chase by Kim Klassen

I did the processing on this a month ago, and followed the recipe too faithfully - and it was my dissatisfaction with this that actually lead me to try another take. But I was clever and instead of tweaking the same image over again I let it be and took another photo to process.

The second photo was shot far more recently, on 5 December, 2012, and the Bohemian Knotweed (Fallopia x bohemica) in the picture is located right outside the fence of our yard. About the plant itself -- for the longest time we've been wondering whether the Knotweed in question is actually a Giant Knotweed (jättitatar in Finnish) or a Japanese Knotweed (japanintatar). Yesterday I googled the case once more and found out that it might actually be a cross between the two! In English, Bohemian Knotweed sounds quite nice and sensible, but the Finnish name, hörtsätatar, makes me giggle. It sounds funny and means nothing at all, suggesting something sort of tousled or dishevelled… well, I guess that suits the plant.

Laden with Snow

Here I went through the recipe but tweaked each layer, and finally ended up NOT using the texture that was part of the challenge. So, although this time I was happy with the result, I had to try again with an image where I'd be happy using Kim's texture.

Orange Gerbera

This is another photo of the session with my belated birthday bouquet. Followed the recipe, not cloning anything in or out, but started with high pass, then used the Gaussian blur but only a touch in the corners, lightened the image with levels adjustment, then darkened the blurred areas with just a tad of black to white gradient, used two colour fill layers, screen and multiply, but only around 10% each, and finally added Kim's texture Chase at 73% colour burn, but masked it out of the Gerbera. The change from the original is rather subtle, but pleases me.

Back to the real world -- doggies demand to get out. Better go and see if the birds still have something to eat. In the morning there were seeds enough at all the feeding posts, and since I had to chop firewood and carry it inside, I didn't take the trouble of adding any. Now off to take care of both the winged and the four-legged.

Living Fully or Frantically

Having been awfully busy all autumn, it was not without certain bitterness that I read Kim's post for day 31 of Beyond Layers. Not daring to even open the posts lest I'll be swept to playing with the challenges when I really should be doing something else, I was not delighted to find a challenge about slowing down.

However, I guess I have come to realize that busy really doesn't matter. Sometimes there's nothing else to do but to rush along, but it's not as if I wouldn't enjoy it. Oh yes, I have been whining about not having enough time, but right now, this very moment, I'm overjoyed to really have had holiday time to beautifully unwind, spend time at home, do little or a lot or nothing at all and -- be there. Together with Better Half and the doggies. Feel.

For the photo challenge, here's my take. Since the past autumn's particular busy has mostly been at work, this picture's fittingly been taken at my work place.

Stairs

Resources used:
- texture Tears of Hope by Smoko-Stock (70% Soft Light)
- texture Be Still by Kim Klassen  (40% Multiply)

Snow, Birthday & Tricks

We woke up this morning to see the first snow, and it seems it's not going to go away either. Not really surprising in the sense that it's been frosty all the weekend, but still. It's cloudy now, the temperature is at zero °C, and the weather forecasts for the rest of the week promise even colder weather, with daytime temperatures around -4°. It's about time we had the winter tyres changed for my car today, Better Half has had them for a week already. Wouldn't really have wanted the winter to start already, there would have been work to do on our yard, if not exactly in the garden anymore. But luckily we were so hard-working a week ago and prepared most of the garden for winter, and it was only on Saturday that we raked the last leaves.

Our kids Justiina and Marleena turn one year today. Happiest birthday, girls! I guess they enjoy the weather - when they first got out of doors, there was plenty enough of snow around, and they had months of it before they even saw the first glimpses of bare soil, let alone grass. Anyway, they certainly have changed from what they were a year ago. Here's one of the first pictures of the girls: Nuppu, Marleena and Justiina having a meal a year ago.

Credits:
- template by myself (link upcoming)
- texture Sweet Tart by Kim Klassen
- papers from kit Pour Loane by Margote
- font Daniel by Daniel Midgley
- font Channel by Måns Grebäck

But to get to the original topic of this post, on day 30 of Beyond Layers Kim shared a few tips with us. The first one of them was how to create animated gifs. Now I have to state that I'm not a great friend of animated gifs in general. I think there are far too many of them blinking around the net. Sometime ages ago I had also created quite a few of them, so I wasn't too enthusiastic about it to start with. But Kim's got this wonderful way of throwing in something new that you'd never known or realized. Since Better Half uses Photoshop at work and especially when making all the various club magazines in the so-called free time, I've also been using it for years, starting even before we bought Elements 2, but I'm constantly learning new things.  That's exactly how it was this time, too. Watching the video, I was suddenly inspired to dig these two series of photos I took of Misaki and Foxy in March 2011 and make animations of each.

Here's Misaki, placed firmly on snow and observing the road, making her presence known to anybody who happens to be within earshot by howling regularly.

This turned out to be quite funny. As if she climbed up from a hole or something, Foxy appears out of nothing behind Misaki, walks around her, goes down to the path, shakes herself and disappears again.

Credits for both:
- font Mawns' handwriting by Måns Grebäck

The second tip of the day was creating a triptych, which, simple as it was, again taught me two new, quicker techniques for creating storybook layouts. Had to try out both of them, and the beautiful bouquet I got a few months late for my 50th birthday from the trade union was the perfect subject. Well knowing my favourite colour, my workmate had ordered the bouquet only stating "make it orange". Well, orange it really was, and I just loved it. I took the photos on 15 October, and didn't retouch them in any way, only piled them together and added the labels and text.

Belated Birthday Bouquet

Autumn Bouquet

Credits for both:
- brush from Kinetic Splatter Brush Set by Dustin Schmieding
- font Mawns' handwriting by Måns Grebäck

Now off to take the car to the garage and buy some birthday presents for the girls.

If not now, then when?

At Beyond Layers, day 23 challenge was to ask oneself "If not now, then when?" That's a tough one for me, always busy doing something but always postponing things as well. To list even part of the things I really should do Now would take all too much time and energy, I'm not going into that...

But actually, one of the bigger long-standing Nows that I have rather recently tackled is this blog. I'd never really used it although I had an account for years, and I'd always sort of been writing a journal in my mind. (The problem with that is, of course, that the thoughts will not stay there for more than a few hours at the most.) Now, after I took this course, I've started putting my blog to good use. Although I'm mostly just posting pictures, I'm still recording events for myself to remember and recall later on, and I feel awfully good about it.

Another Now is approaching -- we'll be attacking our accumulated fat again with Better Half, and this time I'll simply have to find time to do exercise as well. It's not a question of "keeping fit" for me, it's "getting fitter" as I haven't been doing anything for years. Funnily, I feel happy and confident about it, too.

Kim gave us a text brush to use, and here's what I did with it. I took a phone photo of the Saintpaulias at the living-room window, and played with it.

If not now...

Resources used:
- background paper Cold Spell 03 by myself
- texture Stamped Right 2 by Kim Klassen
- text brush If Not by Kim Klassen
- template inspired by Marjo @ legrenierdemarjo.canalblog.com (no longer online)

We've done something extraordinary already, as a matter of fact. As I was going to mow the lawn on Monday, it was sunny and I went to get my sunglasses from the car, a little bird suddenly flew right in front of me, somewhere from the old neglected lawn, nowadays an unruly meadow or something of the sort, next to the old house. As I looked into the direction it came from, I saw something red - the red currant bushes that have been totally neglected for years were shining with berries! So I went and told Better Half and we picked the four or so bushes empty right then and there. Well, not totally empty, must leave something for birds, they've been having all the harvest for years anyway. It didn't result to much, since the bushes are ancient and almost drowned in grass and weeds, but a few litres anyway, and it'll be nice to munch them with yoghurt for a few days.

It's a pity we aren't really into berry-picking, it's quite nice and relaxing. Then why aren't we? Most of the reason is the total impossibility of going out into the woods with the whole pack of dogs, if the intention is anything but giving them some exercise. The other part is our reluctance to go out into the woods without the whole pack - that'd be time wasted. Quite a dilemma, which means that we'll have to resort to buying frozen berries at the supermarket yet again.

Oh, and while picking the berries we saw something interesting neither of us had witnessed before. I noticed this moth sitting on a berry, and it was clearly sucking the liquid from inside the berry. It was fascinating to see the berry slowly collapsing as the moth fed on it. We'd never known they'd feed on anything but nectar. The larvae of course I had known might feed on fruit, but that the adult moths will drink berries? I'd somehow always thought that the wrinkled, dried berries one finds in the bushes had been tasted by birds, but it seems it was moths instead. Fascinating.

Frame It

On Day 22 at Beyond Layers Kim gave us a tutorial with a few examples of how to frame our photos. This wasn't a difficult challenge, as I've been framing my photos for years. I used to create my own frame templates, so that I'd just copy a ready-made frame layer (or layers) from a photoshop document to the picture I was processing, but lately I've mostly been using actions by Jonas M. Rogne. He's got seven different sets of actions for framing, you can find them here. My favourites are the filtered framing actions. The only minor drawback with these actions is that you need to flatten your image before applying them for them to work properly, but I usually make a flattened copy of my image and discard it then after using the frame action and saving for web.

I decided to try out Kim's suggestions, however, since there were some keyboard shortcuts for photoshop I hadn't used before, and you only ever have a chance to remember them if you use them yourself. So here are three images I framed, using each of the methods in the tutorial.

Behind the Gate

This picture I took of our Dandie boy Renny on 2 September, 2010, at our home gate. Here I used the stroke framing technique, although as I used blend mode Saturation, it is very subtle. The other frame, the thin bevelled inner frame, is my own invention, and I used it a lot earlier.  

Resources:
- texture Evolve 2 by Kim Klassen

Sunset on Koli

We visited Koli National Park in Northern Karelia in the east of Finland at the end of May. The landscapes from the wooded hills down to the lakes and woodland are very much a part of Finnish national landscape. The views have been painted by numerous Finnish artists, and whenever anybody in my childhood neighbourhood in Southern Karelia had visitors from abroad or other parts of Finland, Koli National Park was at least recommended to them as a destination or else they'd be taken there (by my father and/or uncle). The sunset that evening was rather spectacular, I wish my picture would do better justice to what we saw then. Used the enlargening canvas method here, and added some layer styles.

Creeping Buttercup

A tiny fly paying a visit to a Creeping Buttercup after some rain on 24 June, 2012. For this image I used the subtle frame technique, which I think suits this image perfectly.

Resources:
- font BlairMdITC TT Medium by Jim Spiece
- font Shardee by Bright Ideas

Dear me. Seems I got carried away, again. It's definitely time to attend to the family, in other words, to feed the doggies. Better Half left for the Terrier Specialty last night with some friends, taking the kiddies to their second show ever, and as I couldn't travel with them because I was working, I am now dog-sitting the older ones. They are beginning to give me certain kind of looks, and Renny will soon start singing. Better act, before their hints turn to demands. Then it might be time to keel over -- waking up last night at two to make breakfast for Better Half and help them pack the car did leave me feeling somewhat groggy, although I managed to snatch some sleep for about three hours before driving to work.