For Cee’s Black and White Challenge: Animals this week, I’ve been playing with some of the Black & White Filter Presets in Adobe Lightroom using a couple of pictures taken at Hurricane Ridge (Olympic National Park in Washington State) last summer.
Picture 1:
Orange B&W filter preset
Blue B&W filter preset
Original
Picture 2:
Yellow B&W filter preset
Original
Red B&W filter preset
Green B&W filter preset
And a couple of dears:
My Empress
Yellow B&W filter preset
Original
…and my half sister Sam (we have different mothers!)
Blue B&W filter preset
Original
The captions (you can see them by hovering over the picture) say which preset was used. I included the originals so one can see how the filter works with the original colors.
Happy holidays, whatever flavor you prefer and a Merry Midwinter!
Actually its the eye of The Empress. She is more interested in laps and being stroked than the thrill of a fight…when I came back from Africa and told her that cats in the wild don’t eat every day she was appalled.
Our cat, the Empress, lashes her tail back and forth and meows as I wrap a hot pot of soup in an old beach towel to keep it warm, while we travel over to Grandma’s. She weaves in an out between my feet trying to trip me as I pack up our picnic dinner.
She knows that we will come home late. She will be neglected and the house will be cold. To add insult to injury we will come back smelling like those nasty dogs.
Human beings are so silly. You can eat your bowl of soup sitting comfortably by the fire while you pet your own soft kitty-cat. No need to travel across town and fraternize with stinky dogs. It makes no sense at all.
In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “An Odd Trio.”
The question posed is: Do you believe in fate or do you believe you can control your own destiny?
My answer is: It isn’t either/or.
My mother-in-law used to say “you pays your money and you takes your choice”. She had a way of saying it that emulated my idea of a man at a fair. You get the prize that goes with your choice. If you want a different prize then you pay more money to make a different choice.
Isn’t the real art of living to see what you can do with with what you have? Choice and fate together make a life. Like making a scrap quilt from fabrics that you have picked up here and there through the years.
…or choosing the softest, sweetest kitty-cat at the Humane Society on the day when you realized you were lonely and needed a companion.
In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Que Sera Sera.”
As can be seen, my Empress is still working very hard to help me finish the quilt. I set it down to check dinner last night and couldn’t pick it back up when I sat down again. Then I noticed that it had grown eyes!
The cat looks as if she is trying to catch Santa in the act. But really she is watching the bird feeder. Is this a metaphor for the Christmas season? I wonder sometimes about how we value belief in something we know is not real. What drives us?
It must be pretty important since we, as a society work so hard to keep up the Santa Claus type magic at Christmas idea. Families will go into debt and do without basics the rest of the year to keep up the idea that magic can happen.
In my family we always had Christmas stockings as a special thing, in some ways it was the most special, as we came of age we shared in stuffing stockings and it was a creative and fun part of the holiday. thinking of something that would fit into the stockings (ours were not as over-sized as those on the market today) that would intrigue or delight the recipient. That was not my husband’s family tradition and he rarely puts anything into stockings. So when our son went off and in years we are alone the only thing in my stocking was the candy, nuts and orange that I put in all the stockings. Even though I knew there would be nothing, knew there was plenty for me elsewhere, and that I am greatly loved, I still felt a little sad and neglected that first time. The last few years I have resisted the urge to fill my own stocking so I wouldn’t have to go into the kitchen and check on breakfast while everyone else was opening their stocking. This year it will be just the two of us here on Christmas morning, I think we will skip putting stockings up altogether. Sacrilege!
