climbing

O Tannenbaum

Here's our family room tree. We have switched over to the LED lights which makes the white look really blue. I prefer the warmness of the old lights, but you can't beat the savings in energy and lifespan of these.

Yes - we do put up more than one tree in our house. I LOVE Christmas! When we moved to this house, I had the builders put in an electrical outlet in the foyer where I envisioned a tree going. We put a real tree in the family room and an artificial 10 footer in the foyer. The foyer tree is up and lit, but not yet decorated. You can probably see a little of my control issues in this tree....it is the red and gold tree. The foyer tree is blue/silver/clear glass. Yes....moving on....

This is T-Boz's Santa picture from last year. I had one of him, one of L-Dog and one with both of them framed in these ornament frames last year. He was a really great looking Santa!!

This is an ornament we received in 2005 - L-Dog's first Christmas. It is Winne the Pooh by Lennox.


Here is another L-Dog themed ornament - a guitar of course!

I broke out the tripod to take these pictures. The ISO is set to 400, the apeture to f22 and I used the remote timer to fire the pictures. The shutter was open for a full 30 seconds. It was fun to play around.

What does your tree look like?

car seat donations

I've been busy shipping car seats and working on the foundation blog today. Check it out over the course of the next few days to see some families featured to whom the foundation has donated seats.

As always, we have a huge list of children waiting to receive their seat from the foundation. Each day, they are at risk riding in either seats they are too young for, too big for, or no car seat at all. Can you spare the price of your daily coffee today to donate to the foundation and make a difference in the safety of these children's lives? I, and their families, would be forever grateful!

silhouette

T-Boz is getting so big!

a winner

I won my first ever blog giveaway on Thursday! Another set of Patti Brown's Kaleidescope overlays! I opted for the Light Set and had a little play!

Here is L-Dog in Scotland at the New Lanark Mills museum. There was a room dedicated to music and light. Both boys enjoyed it very much!

Here is my original photo of L-Dog:

And here is the addition of Bokeh Touch:

Interesting to see the combination of a black and white photo with a color overlay.

And just so he is not left out, here is T-Boz in that same location:

I heart faces - Fix It Friday

Jenna entered this photo originally for the Constructive Feedback spot at I heart faces. She wrote that she thought the photo was a little bright and needed to be toned down a bit and she wished that the colors were more vibrant. She also felt like the photo might have been overexposed.

Here is her original photo:

Here is my first fix - a color:



Here's what I did:

- I ran it through the community edition of Noiseware to reduce some of the grainyness/noise that came with the original photo as it was shot with a high ISO setting of 800.
- I opened it in Adobe Camera Raw and adjusted some of the exposure, recovery and blacks. I also bumped the clarity a little.
- In PSE4, I did a curves bump by pulling the center straight up. I then did a layer mask and only applied it to the man on the ground.
- I then did a levels and squeezed the sliders in on both ends and then moved the center slider over to the left till I got the contrast and look I wanted.
- I then did a Hue/Saturation layer and bumped up th blues and the yellows individually.
- I did a futher Hue/Saturdation layer and reduced the red and only applied it to his face using a layer mask.
- I then did a edge sharpening using an action that I got on Clickin Moms.
- Finally I added a vignette using an MCP action (a freebie!)

Here are a couple more plays with this picture. The first is running PW's Old West:


and lastly PW's seventies (which I adore!):


Check out what others did with this photo at I Heart Faces.

congratulations my friend

May you have a very long and happy marriage - love you!