Instagram-ish

At BL day 54 was declared Instagram day. This old fart had to dig up what that meant. Instagram seems to be this online photo-sharing thingy where you upload your phone pictures and apply some filters on them. Oh and all the pictures are square. I tried it out, but couldn't for the life of me figure out how to use it on the browser. Obviously it's meant to be used only by phone, so I decided it wasn't for me. Anyway, for the challenge we were to try out some instagram-ish photoshop actions on our photos, and there was a scavenger hunt as well. As you might expect, I did the hunt in my archives again, but restricted myself to using photos from last summer only.

Also, when I started playing with the actions Kim suggested we use I was not awfully impressed by the way they were made - they didn't open a new document, as many, or create the action as editable layers, as many others I've used, so I had to use the history tool to go back to the original if I wanted to try out the action. Sure gave me good practice in using the history tool! In the end I decided I wouldn't be using only the given actions but some others, too.

There were five themes for the scavenger hunt: something pretty, something blue, something borrowed, water and dreamy. For the pretty one I chose a picture I took on my birthday as we were driving back home from Helsinki. We stopped at this new lay-by service place, and they had this little thing we call maitolaituri in Finnish. Literally you could translate it as "milk jetty" - it was a place where the farmers would leave their milk churns by the roadside where they could be collected by the dairy deliverers. There are none in that use anymore, but I thought this thing, although new and non-authentic, was pretty and nostalgic and definitely worth a photo.

Something Pretty

Resources:
- Instagram filter action by Daniel Box
- framing action by Paint The Moon

My "something blue" photo is a photo taken by the river on a walk with the dogs.

Something Blue

Resources:

- Instagram filter action by Daniel Box 

- framing action by Paint The Moon

For "something borrowed" I chose a photo of our dandie Justiina, whom our friend Nunnu borrowed to cuddle with. I photographed them after the ring at the Terrier Specialty show, basking on the grass in the sunshine.

Something Borrowed

Resources:

- Instagram filter action by Daniel Box 

- framing action by Paint The Moon

The next prompt was "water". I had two I liked and couldn't decide which picture to choose, they were so different but they go well together. They also reflect well the difference between the dandies in them, the two sisters Justiina and Marleena. Justiina is approaching the water carefully and suspiciously and barely wets her nose there, whereas Marleena happily wades in the water, enjoying the refreshing coolness on a warm day. What the picture doesn't show, however, is her constant rushing in and out of the water. She has recently discovered that one can actually play in the water, but her sister still thinks water is only good for drinking.
 

Tasting the Water

Resources:

- Instagram filter action by Daniel Box 

- framing action by Paint The Moon

Wading in Water

Resources:- CoffeeShop Vintagram action by Rita @ The Coffee Shop Blog

- framing action by Paint The Moon

The last prompt was "dreamy". Here I ended up choosing two images taken in Lappajärvi during our DDT Club Show and summer camp at the beginning of August. The first photo is of a folly right on the lake shore, the other one is a shot to the lake - originally I tried to shoot the gull sitting on the navigation mark, but it turned into a shot of the type "there-is-a-gull-there-just-try-and-spot-it".

Folly on the Lake

Resources:
- action Watermelon Blues by Sarah Lynn Cornish

- framing action by Paint The Moon

Lakeshore Rushes

Resources:
- action Pretty Hazy by Sarah Lynn Cornish

- Instagram filter action by Daniel Box 

- framing action by Paint The Moon

Lots of dogs and water in these pictures. Yes, we had a nice summer.

More fences

The challenge of day 53 at BL was to watch a video lesson and try it on an image by Kim. I didn't see much point in simply copying what she had done, so I went straight to the second part, testing the recipe and techniques on an image of my own. It wasn't actually a spoken part of the challenge, but the underlying idea seemed to be fences, so I decided to try the techniques on a fence image.

First I found a fence picture related to my previous post about our re-fenced yard last autumn. It's a photo of the fence on the northern side of our yard after some snowfall last December. Tried Kim's techniques here, but not the recipe, since warming up a snowy picture didn't feel like a good idea.

Snowy Fence

Resources:
- framing action Simple by Chain

So I had to dig into the archives again, but after a while I found exactly what I needed: a photo of a fence around a church in Lübeck, photographed in May 2012. The dark fence against the red brick of the church was well suited for the warming and reddening Kim did in her recipe, so I used Kim's recipe almost as such, with minor adjustments, and followed the techniques as well.

Fence in Lübeck

Resources:
- texture Pumpkin Grunge by Kim Klassen

- framing action Simple by Chain

And on to posting the next challenge. I'm determined to get all this stuff posted so I can start working on something new.

Of Travelling and Knitting

The challenge for day 48 at Beyond Layers: to have a loved one photograph you doing something you might consider mundane. This one was meant to made us think about our special gifts, that whatever we create and touch is of value and important. Kim took pictures of her friend Myriam making a salad, peeling and dicing and so on.

Another aspect of the challenge, as I see it, was using our hands, and that made it easy for me to choose how to tackle this one with photos I already had: my knitting. I don't know if I see it as mundane, but I definitely am happy for finding it again, and I suppose it could be considered a gift?

Resources:
- template 25 by myself
- paper Happiest Search 05 by myself
- font SF Arch Rival by ShyFonts
- font Learning Curve Pro by Blue Vinyl Fonts
- brush Stitched Mess by Kim Klassen
- Post it sticker by Akizo

This layout actually meets another challenge demand, too: the photo of me grinning goofily and holding the finished sock was taken by my friend Marjo. The sock was a trial for a bigger project, to test out if I, who had not been knitting socks for the past thirty-five years or so, could knit some pairs of this pattern or not. I had the correct yarn for the pattern at home but not in the correct colours (grey, black and white) but who cares - the purpose was only to try out the pattern, and I had three colours anyway, orange, green and grey. So as we took a train to Helsinki to celebrate Marjo's birthday, I started knitting, and before we arrived back home, the sock was finished. The sock is actually rather crappy, but for a first effort after such a long time I'm mightily pleased with it. But no, I'm not going to knit more of them.

Which sort of brings me to the next layout. I got a new sock pattern to try out from my boss, and I really like it. She said it's a traditional Finnish pattern, and anyway, it's simple and pretty. These pictures were taken when I was celebrating the World Wide Knit in Public Day all by myself, knitting in public but without much more company than some cyclists, joggers, jackdaws, wagtails, thrushes and a heard-but-not-seen pheasant. The weather was wonderful and my knit-in-public days pleasant and relaxing.

Resources:
- template 26 by myself
- brush by Mouritsa
- paper Blue Jean 02 by myself
- font Denigan by Måns Grebäck

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.

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.

Texture Tuesday & Musings

Haven't had time to take part in any of the Texture Tuesday challenges for quite a while. Suddenly yesterday, when I had finished the Colour Week, I remembered it was Tuesday and that there'd be another challenge up at Kim's Café. This time we were simply asked to use a certain texture, Dream It.

I ended up using three textures by Kim here. The picture was taken on 9 May this year, somewhere between Glasgow and Inverness, on a lay-by where we stopped for a photographing break.

Spring in Scotland

Resources used:
- textures Dream It, Oh My & Grey Day by Kim Klassen

Then to Beyond Layers. On Day 21, the challenge Kim gave us was to reflect on how we feel about our own art. There was talk about our expectations, of wanting to create a great piece and, when we achieve one such, of being afraid we'll never achieve something like that again. It so easily stops us from even trying. Kim encouraged us to get past this, reminded we're not supposed to make perfect art but simply make art for the fun of it.

What is preventing me from creating is not blocks like this but mostly just lack of time. Well, practically always exactly that. Soon my time to do this will be very limited, so at the moment I'm just gorging on this, creating, and thoroughly enjoying the process of doing so.

As for the love of comments, who wouldn't love words of encouragement? Receiving none can certainly make one feel a failure - I've been there with my poems, years ago, although it wasn't that I needed so much to hear what people thought, I simply needed to know that somebody had at least read what I had written.

I think it still is important, and definitely why I choose to share what I do online. If I know somebody has seen my work, if I somehow get to share it, it really is a reward in itself. Isn't attention what we're all after? Because all art is communication…

I aim to record things I see and experience, to teach my eye and to please it. I'm overjoyed if someone else understands, enjoys and appreciates what I create, but that's not my primary reason for doing it. Yes, I do jump up and down and shout Hooray! whenever I get a comment, and I see nothing wrong with it, but really, encouragement from Better Half is what I need and value most, because who'd know better where I stand and what I might be trying to convey?

Splashes of Red

Time for the Beyond Layers fifth and last day of the Colour Week. The colour this time was red, and I'm still in Salzburg in these pictures. As a matter of fact, when making these assignments I realized that it's not a bad idea to build scrapbooking layouts from a certain place or event around a specific colour. So far I've always done things strictly chronologically, but why should one? This is a nice-looking way to show the pictures, too.

I've stacked here lots of memories - the Oriental gift shop where we were so well attended to, the piles on piles of Mozart bath ducks, the Promenade concert that was cut short by the thunderstorm, the puppets of the Marionetten Theater, the street sign of the Mozart dinner concert we attended on my birthday, the cafe where we had breakfast the same day, not to mention the local fashions we window-shopped. How come so many of those clothes were red, actually?

Seeing Red in Salzburg

Thank you for the resources:
- template 2012-002 by Scrap'Anges
- background paper from Bruissement de Yin Bruissement de Yang by Au coin de l'objectif
- gradient by Digital Phenom

Splashes of Red in Salzburg

Resources used:
- template Avril by Pim
- paper from Close to Ground by myself
- gradient by Digital Phenom

Wow. That was a fun template, with frames for no less than 26 pictures! And with this I declare my Colour Week closed. It has taken me twelve days to finish this "week", but I'm awfully pleased with the results, and don't regret that I did it the long way, concentrating on each day at a time. I have to admit, however, that I also look forward to tackling something new. Day 21, here I come!

Blue Skies Smiling at Me

For Beyond Layers Day 20, the fourth day of the Colour Week, I collected blue skies and other things from our trip to Salzburg at the end of July. It was a wonderful holiday, we enjoyed all of it, even the part where we first got soaking wet in a sudden thunder storm that started during an open-air concert in the Mirabell Gardens, rushed into one of the buses we usually took and then realized it was not going where we were, and when the wind blew Better Half's brand new Panama hat onto the pavement and a friendly young man managed to catch it…

I loved skimming through the pictures for some beautiful and memorable blueness, most of it the sunny kind, although there are some watery bits as well.

Helsinki-Salzburg, July 2012

A Week of Colour

Beyond Layers, Week 9. This is a week of colour (for me, that is, most of the group already did this eight weeks ago). The challenge is to focus on photographing a certain colour every day for a week, or actually, five days. *AAARGH* if you'll excuse my expressing myself like this.

The big aaaargh here is that I lost my camera in Salzburg. Should I say, it went missing in action. I could even claim that an Allosaurus ate it. Don't really know what happened, really. I still have the camera, but it just won't work. We were in the Haus der Natur, the natural history museum, and as usual, I was snapping here and there, and then suddenly, after I had taken a picture of Better Half scratching the chin of a Tyrannosaurus skull and another one of the Allosaurus there, something happened. When I tried to switch the camera on again, the lens just came half-way out and got stuck. After that, it hasn't been working. After spending time in the suitcase on our two flights back from Salzburg, the lens had retracted again, but when I (hoping against hope) tried to switch it on again, it beeped of malfunction and that was it.

Then Better Half thought of the old camera that has just been sitting on the shelf for a few years, but it turns out something's wrong with it, too. Seems it has been gathering dust for too long to be operational anymore - I can see nothing on the display, and when I try to take a photo anyway, it's mostly black. So no solution there either. All I have now is my phone to take photos with, and I'm feeling seriously deprived.

So, I'll settle to digging into my archives for the photos instead of photographing especially for the purpose. Some people in the group had followed the example of Xanthe and created storyboards, I think I'll follow suit.

Green - Summer 2012

For this storyboard I decided to pick different kinds of green things (read: not to have plants all over the place) and restrict myself to things photographed this summer. The pictures were taken in Dunfermline, Lübeck, Salzburg, Vienna and, exotically, inside our car.

Resources used:
- template 09 by Isa
- scotch tape from Bruissements Lointains by Au coin de l'objectif
- splash mask from Doux Bruissements by Au coin de l'objectif
- font Blokletters Viltstift by LeFly Fonts
- font Chalkduster

As an afterthought I decided to post another green picture as well, just because I like the particular photo. And yes, it is a plant. I took it on 13 July of a Lady's Mantle growing in our garden. I love their tiny, gentle, light green flowers. Not a lot of processing this time, just adjusted the levels a tad, added the text and made the frame.

Lady's Mantle

Resources used:
- font Windsong by Bright Ideas
- font Bank Gothic Light

And now off to tackle the rest of the to-do things for today.

...the Sea Whisper'd Me

On day 15 of Beyond Layers Kim gave us a prompt: Whisper. It was very interesting to start creating from a word-prompt only. The first thing that popped into my mind was the finishing line of Walt Whitman's Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, and although I tried to find easier things that would've whispered to me, I couldn't shake the thought. That's Whitman for me, anytime. You wish you could get away from his wordiness and heaviness and all, but the words just keep rolling in my head and annoying as it is, I cannot help loving them. It's not a passionate love, but a persistent one. Very persistent.

So it had to be sea-related, but of course I knew I had no photo in the archives to convey the mood of the poem, and couldn't possibly go and shoot by the seaside, as it happens to be rather far away from here.

I decided, then, to go by the words only, not the poem. Perhaps I'll sometime get back to the poem, but I think that has to be done in photomanipulation... But here's the whispered result.

...the Sea Whisper'd Me

It's a picture taken on Baltic Sea, on 16 May this year, when we had just left Lübeck on our homeward journey. Actually, I was very happy the sea only whispered this time, instead of roaring. The North Sea between IJmuiden and Newcastle twelve days previously was rather rough, and I had my first experience of sea-sickness. Thinking about it now, it could have been much worse, but it felt like the end of the world at the time. At least I now know first-hand what sea-sickness is.

But back to the picture - used the textures here to make it even softer and at times I thought I'd lose the whole image when toning it down, but then, it's meant to be a whisper.

Resources used:
texture Optional by Jerry Jones
texture Awaken by Kim Klassen
gradient Sea Dreams 15 by ElvenSword

 And here's the recipe.

How annoyingly simple the recipe makes it look, again, and how much tweaking went into each step...

Brush Lovin'?

Day 12 at Beyond Layers was about using brushes in Photoshop. Nothing really new there, I have created some for my own use and used quite a few - I love them in photomanipulations and also for scrapbooking. I have used brushes in scrapbooking layouts and also to create my own scrapbooking papers. I have used pretty swirl stamps on cards and to print pretty envelopes, too. But I still have to figure out their possible uses for photos.

Ok, you could do what Kim has done and create word art with quotes, but I see two problems with this: first, how likely am I to use a quote in a picture? Not very. During Beyond Layers I have already done that far more than I thought I ever would. It's just not my cup of tea. Second, how likely am I to use the same quote again? The chances for that are really minimal, and even then I would most likely want to use a different font. And the whole point of stamp brushes is that they are meant to be used several times, right?

Actually I'm asking myself, what possible use could I have for these stamp brushes in processing my photos? I can see but two possibilities -- they are really great for things like a watermark, I use one on all my pictures. Another option might be to use a stamp brush to frame a photo, I could see myself doing that. After all I've tried that before when creating icons. Anything else? I really don't know.

So I obviously didn't go brush crazy, but I did the Day 12 assignment anyway and used one of the word art brushes provided. Here's the result.

Shipboard Sunset

The photo was taken on 2 May this year, somewhere on the Baltic Sea. The sunset was really beautiful, and the thin stripe in top middle is a plane.

Thank you for the resources used:
- texture Raised Effect by Jerry Jones
- texture Paper Stained Light by Kim Klassen
- word art brush from Beyond Brush Set by Kim Klassen
- framing action by Chain

Time Capsules & Storyboard

The challenge for Beyond Layers Day 5 & 6 was easy: creating Time Capsules and making a storyboard, with ready-made templates.

Time capsules is a concept I love. Photography is for me in any case recording - recording everyday events, capturing moments. It's something I've learned from my father. He was a keen photographer, and of course took pictures at Christmas, in family parties and on holiday trips, when we toured Finland with my parents and sister, but that wasn't all. He also shot us kids in our everyday. I still treasure a particular series he caught of me and my cousin, aged about five, playing with a pail of water in our grandparents' garden and totally oblivious to being photographed.

When my mother passed away, we had a hard time finding "presentable" pictures of her for the funeral, although Dad had been photographing her for decades. It's customary to have this one picture of the deceased on a table, with a candle and some flowers next to it. In the picture the person is seated alone, preferably with a smile on her face, and that's it.

Well, there were loads of shots of Mum walking, working, dancing, fishing, swimming, skiing, gardening and very very seldom was she alone.  I asked my sister why we couldn't make a collage instead, showing Mum the way I remember her, active, but of course Sis wouldn't hear of it, because it's Not Done.

A few years ago I stumbled on digital scrapbooking on the Net, and realized this might be something for me. I'm not really into embellishments or quotes... what I like to do is tell stories, capture time. In 2010, I bought a small album and created a birthday present for my ever active better half, showing many of the things accomplished during the year, from one birthday to the next. I'm still quite proud of the little album.

But now to the challenge itself.  I decided to make a time capsule of the day the challenge was given, 3 May. On that day I journeyed from Rostock in Germany to Zwolle in the Netherlands on a coach tour with some students of mine. We left our ship in Rostock after 8 in the morning, and it was a 550-kilometre drive, so most of the day was spent just sitting on the coach. We arrived in Zwolle early enough in the afternoon to go for a long walk in town, though, which naturally resulted in a lot of pictures.

Early morning in Rostock. Pictures from the shipboard.
Template by Kim Klassen 

Driving across Northern Germany. Shots from the coach window.
Template by Kim Klassen.

Breaks along the Autobahn. Shots of the places we stopped at.
Template by Ginger Pixel. 

On the  road in the Netherlands, more coach window shots.
Template by Kim Klassen  

Sightseeing in Zwolle.
Template by me.

Walking in Zwolle.  More pictures of the town centre.
Template by Timounette.

Window-Shopping in Zwolle. Still more photos of the town centre.

Template by Flaneuse.

The thing I learned here was to make the outlook more uniform by adding a gradient map layer to the storyboards.

Me in Six Words

Day 3 Challenge at Beyond Layers was to write a Six-Word Memoir as published on Smith Mag site, or as I took it, to describe ourselves in six words. Six words. Well, after some scribbling I ended up with Laughing, loving, teaching, touching, doing, daring...

The photographic challenge was to add the 6-word memoir to a photo. Originally, I did just that, but somehow, with the photo I chose, the text looked out of place. There was simply too little room for it. So I thought, why not do a scrapbook layout with the photo and text? And I did, and it looks so much more like me now.

Texture Wonderful Magic by Kim Klassen
Template by N@te

The photo was taken on 28 July, 2008. It was my birthday, and we were coming home from the DDT Club Show in Imatra, and, if I remember correctly, decided more or less on the spur of the moment not to drive straight back to north but to take a day tour in South Eastern Finland. It was a wonderful sunny day, and we visited the beautiful Punkaharju ridge, the Kerimäki Church, which is the largest wooden church in the world, the Valamo Monastery in Heinävesi and the Iron Age hill fort in Sulkava. In this picture, Misaki is admiring Lake Saimaa from the hill fort (or the fisherman down on the jetty, or the boat on the lake, but anyway). It was quite a climb to the hill, especially for our low-legged doggies, as there were hundreds of steps to climb, but we really enjoyed it.

I did another take on the giraffes, too. Here they are. Not much has changed, except I lightened up the image, and I am far happier with it now.

Texture Tuesday - The Quote eDition

Haven't  been around for a long time to participate in Kim Klassen's challenges, so now that I had a little time in my hands, I decided I'd do something about it. The Texture Tuesday challenge this week was a quote and a texture by Kim Klassen - this time I chose to be minimal and included only one texture. (!)

Seagulls on a rooftop in Inverness, Scotland.

Thank you for the texture:
- "Happy Heart" by Kim Klassen

The photo was taken on the morning of 11 May this year, from my hotel room window in Inverness, Scotland. I followed the two seagulls there for a goodish while. They seemed to enjoy the place, pattering around there and occasionally finding a tidbit as well.

Texture Tuesday - The Happy Heart eDition

Barcelona, October morning

My second Texture Tuesday challenge entry. This time I ended up with an older photo I  found in my archives this week - this one I took actually in 2006 in Barcelona.

It was a rather early morning in October, we were walking along the sea shore, and because of both the time and the season the 4.5 kilometres of beach were mostly deserted. Looking at the picture, I can still almost hear and smell the sea and feel the sunshine in the gradually warming morning.

Textures used: texture "Happy Heart" by Kim Klassen (twice), additionally a texture from Jerry Jones's "Art Grunge Texture Set".

Texture Tuesday - the white eDition

Paris, Charles de Gaulle Airport

This is my very first entry to the Kim Klassen Café Texture Tuesday challenge. Just found her blog yesterday, so inspiring! Luckily I had the possibility to work on this challenge today.

The photo was taken last year, as we were travelling to Birmingham. We had to change planes in Paris, and unfortunately that also meant we had to change terminals. The layout of the Aéroport Charles de Gaulle is not the simplest and navigating from one terminal to another is not exactly straightforward. Our whole experience of the airport was that it was pretty complicated. Navigating to the new terminal seemed to take forever as you had to walk and walk and turn this way and that and then walk some more.

While trotting along the corridors, we ran into this sight, which I thought well deserved to be photographed.

For this image, I used two of Kim's textures, 'simplicity' and 'happy heart'.