For Wordless Wednesday and Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Landscapes or Waterscapes.
Methow in the morning
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Local Vistas
I’m late. Lost a couple of days because we headed over to Dad’s to enjoy the low tides.
We live a block below the good views. Here is a random gallery of photos taken within walking distance of my house or my dad’s house, my two centers of orbit in response to last week’s lens artists challenge: Local Vistas.
To see any photo larger just click on it.
Lowest low
Due to the lunar nodal cycle we had the lowest low tide in 13 years yesterday. We spent the day over at my Dad’s. He lives on Vashon Island. For fun I took a series of photos from about the same vantage point to show the dramatic difference over the course of about twelve hours starting about 6 in the morning.
Clearly the weather wasn’t much: the sky was pretty much flat gray.
I seem to do this every year…
Raindrops on roses: I am fascinated by the different shapes of the drops and how some of them act like magnifying glasses to show detail in the rose.
This is the palest of the roses in my yard. I do not know the variety. It was here and well established when we moved here 35 years ago.
Prior House Interview
I am one of Garrison Kiellor’s “shy persons”, but I was so complimented when Yvette of Prior House blog asked to do an interview of me that I said yes. the post is here: Prior House interview with XingfuMama.
One-to-Three Photo Processing Challenge
One-to-three is a monthly photo processing challenge on my other web site, theSquirrelChase.com. I’d love to have you join in: The challenge is simple: take one photo and get creative with it by processing it three different ways. Then share the results, with a link in the comments to this month’s post. I’ll do a start up post on the first of each month, including a round up of entries from the preceding month, so we can all share in the creativity and fun.
Here’s my June 2022 contribution:
How to get the looks above:
The first is a tinted sketch effect using tools and filters built into the GIMP. A post describing how to do this is here: How to get a tinted sketch effect using the GIMP.
G’mic is a plug in for the GIMP (and other programs I believe) with over 500 filters from basic editing to advanced and a myriad of artistic effects as well.
The second is the Illustration Look filter in the Artistic group of G’MIC filters.
Variation number 3 uses G’MIC’s Morphology Painting filter.
This month I focused on using the GIMP and the G’MIC plug-in for it. If you are interested in trying out the GIMP and G’MIC you might find this page on my other web site useful: GIMP Articles and Tutorials.
P.S. These are the same techniques and filters on a landscape in the June One-to-Three on the Squirrel Chase.
Challenge Background
Since having to isolate due to the pandemic, last spring, I’ve been doing a lot of experimentation with photo processing and I thought it might be fun to share some of the things I’ve discovered and see what others are doing.
I’m hosting the challenge on the other site to try and keep my WordPress.org skills alive.
While my cat lay dying…
You might say that I’ve been on a creative ramble of late. Calling it a journey would ascribe an intent that doesn’t exist.
My cat passed away just before Easter. I had the luxury of time, and spent a lot of it letting her be on my lap petting her. She has always liked to “help” me with computing. I think she liked the warmth of the computer and it felt like I was petting her when I used the mouse.
I got a little bored just sitting though, and went down an internet rabbit hole that wound up with discovering a program called Blender.
Blender is my kind of video game. It is a 3-d graphics program. I have no idea why it is named after a kitchen appliance.
I started by doing YouTube tutorials.
I did the donut:
This was a 16 part tutorial by Blender Guru. It is legendary, almost everyone mentions “doing the donut” in their “my journey to learning Blender” posts, of which there are many. This is an amazing, incredibly thorough tutorial. It is animated : The donut spins and the sprinkles drift downwards, like petals falling. My computer would take about 12 hours to render it into a video so I haven’t completed that last step. I also did Gran Abbitt’s Old Man and Scary Monster beginner series. (If you ever decide to learn this program I’d start with that, then do the donut.)
Nothing is safe from my new obsession:
About the time I finished those tutorials my sister-in-law sent us a cute Easter card:
I watched sculpting tutorials by Grant Abbitt and made this:
Now, I have two projects going. I am modeling my sister’s Asian garden into a fantasy island, and I am learning how to “rig” and animate characters with Ryan King Art’s Penguin Tutorial.
I’m already eyeing my little deer Amie-Lu for a potential rig.
One-to-Three Photo Processing Challenge
One-to-three is a monthly photo processing challenge on my other web site, theSquirrelChase.com. I’d love to have you join in: The challenge is simple: take one photo and get creative with it by processing it three different ways. Then share the results, with a link in the comments to this month’s post. I’ll do a start up post on the first of each month, including a round up of entries from the preceding month, so we can all share in the creativity and fun.
Here’s my May 2022 contribution:
This month I am experimenting with a new filter that I recently noticed in the G’mic plug-in to the GIMP: Paint with brush. I used it on my little bird last month, but thought it would be interesting to look at how it handles different styles of photos. So below I use a few paint with brush presets on a landscape.
How to get the looks above:
I used three different presets within the filter. The default settings, and the colored edges and dreamy presets.
G’mic is a plug in for the GIMP (and other programs I believe) with over 500 filters from basic editing to advanced and a myriad of artistic effects as well. The Paint with brush variation filters are in G’mic’s Artistic group. Filters>G’MIC Qt Then select Artistic and the filters.
This filter has seven presets, eight if you count the default settings. You can get very different looks using the one filter.
Also as part of this same experiment, I used with the same filter on a couple of different styles of photos. In my theSquirrelChase post I used the same filter with a dandelion seed head, a close-up with a lot of detail. And on Instagram I used a camellia, a simpler photo with subtle color variations and textures.
Challenge Background
Since having to isolate due to the pandemic, last spring, I’ve been doing a lot of experimentation with photo processing and I thought it might be fun to share some of the things I’ve discovered and see what others are doing.
I’m hosting the challenge on the other site to try and keep my WordPress.org skills alive.
Here comes the rain…da-da-da-da
Interesting, and rather dramatic clouds, today. It actually snowed a bit. In Seattle…in April? Weird. The clouds were beautiful, anyway.
South American Sea Lions
At Peninsula Valdes. I love the look on the faces as they turn them toward the sun. Reminds me a bit of cats.
And in the Beagle Channel. Loved watching them play in the water.
The featured image is Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse which is on an islet in the Beagle Channel.
On our cruise around Cape Horn in 2017 we saw some enormous sea lions. The galleries above show a couple of spots where they were very present. I was fascinated to see the difference in size between the males and females. Also by the fact that the babies are black so they absorb more warmth from the sun.
For today’s Ragtag Daily Prompt: Sea Lions.
XingfuMama 