Recent this and thats...

"Lily Pad"

So, it's been awhile since I last wrote. I've been a bit busy, what with teaching and all. It has definitely been an interesting and exhausting past couple of weeks. I feel like I'm teetering just on the edge of being overwhelmed. I haven't dropped the ball in a huge way....yet. I hope that I never do.

But, enough on that. I sold my first photo recently!! Hurray! It's not the one above, but if you want to see it click here. It's not one of my bests, but it was sold to an advertising company working for Economic Development Council of the Bloomington Normal Area. The image on the left is the poster they developed from my photo. I think it looks nice.

So the photo above is one of my newer creations. I took the photo at Epcot early this past summer. I finally got around to editing it. I needed some creative me time, so I went through my old photos to see if I had missed any nice photos. I came across this one and wondered why I hadn't edited it before.


For this edit, I changed the color saturation. I made the pinks more vibrant and I desaturated the other colors. Then I started playing with textures. That's really my favorite technique to use in photo editing anymore. I love the way textured photos look. They are just a bit more poignant. However, it's always hard to find the right balance between texture and photo detail. I never want to wash out too many details, but I want the texture to be visible. It can sometimes be a tough call.

I used several different texture layers in this photo. Mostly I used scanned scrapbooking paper textures. They really work great for textured photos. I also used a couple paint textures I created. I wanted some brush stroke textures, and decided to make my own since I couldn't find too many just lying around. The textures are totally utilitarian, though, and are definitely not art in any way, shape or form. :)

I finally added some shading to the corners, to make it look a little more faded out. I just used the paint brush tool on Corel and played with the layer settings until it looked the way I wanted. That's all there was to it.

OK, so I bored you with my photo editing techniques. Sorry for that. I have been having trouble falling asleep at a decent hour, and I find typing can sometimes make me sleepy. (It was a horrible thing when I was trying to write papers at the last minute in college...) Besides, it had been a while since I had posted anything.

On a side note, I changed my banner, just for fun. I love my old "Lonely, in Yellow" photo, but I felt it was time for a change.

I hope my 2-4 readers are doing well! :) God bless! Until the next time I need to make myself sleepy!