Almost every year at Christmas time I buy an amaryllis bulb. I love their bright colors, textures and elegant shapes. Just throwing away something alive has always felt wrong, so I now have several ghosts of Christmases past, in the form of amaryllis bulbs.
They re-bloom every year. Left to their own devices, which is my general approach to gardening, they seem to have settled on March. Six of them are going at it right now.
One thing is pretty clear: I need to clean my windows!
These are volunteers in yard. They showed up many years ago and keep coming back. I think they are oriental poppies.
It really rained yesterday and I noticed this bright, cheerful camellia when out with the dogs. It reminded me of how we sometimes walk when caught out in the rain, facing slightly down, the little petal almost looks like a hand put over to shield the eyes.
For Bushboy’s Last on the card-February 2022. This was my last on card, the header is my next to last on card for the month. Also for Cee’s Flower of the Day.
When I think of China I think of the color red. These are some photos from trips I took there in 2014.
The Chinese love the color red. It symbolizes fire and happiness…along with a lot of other things. This article talks a bit about that: Lucky numbers and colors in Chinese culture.
China red is a classic paint color and Pantone has a Chinese red:
How does this compare to the reds I actually saw in China?
This is the last photo I took in July. As I looked at it I realized that it has an extraordinary range of red in it: From the rusty red of the pollen through burgundy in its speckles over to magenta in the petals.
I may need to try and do some art with this one.
For Cee’s Flower of the Day, Bushboy’s Last on the card-July 2021 and Travel Words’ Life in Colour-Red.
In memorium of Armistice Day, and in appreciation for all veterans for their service.
When we were in England in 2018, the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, there was a very moving memorial installation based on poppies. It was an amazing work of art, both in the creation of every individual poppy and the very careful placement to get the overall effect.
For Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Dark Red.
My amaryllises are still going strong, but I think this may be their last hurrah for the year. The three bulbs have been providing cheer continuously since the beginning of December. I’m not generally a great lover of red but the weather has been cloudy and I’ve really been enjoying the different shades of red and the way the light plays on the petals.
The one that started the display in early December is also the one that has one still unopened bud. Obviously an over achiever in more than one way!
For Nancy Merrill’s Photo a Week: Red
…and the closeup of the pollen is for Sunshine’s Macro Monday.
I admire the work of both Bren of Brashley Photography and Julie Powell. I’ve learned a lot from them. This morning Bren posted a “Twirling Tuesday Challenge”. It intrigued me, but the directions (written by Julie Powell) were for Photoshop.
Being an amateur on a fixed income I haven’t sprung for the Adobe Photoshop software. I wondered if I could create a similar effect in the GIMP. GIMP stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program. It is shareware, which means the price right.
A bit of internet research and experimentation today led me to this process:
Both Julie Powell’s directions and the video on Brashley photos post use a Photoshop filter in the pixelate menu called “mezzotint”. The GIMP doesn’t have that choice near that in its pixelize filter. There is a GIMP plug in to get the effect, but I decided to see what would happen without that step. I was in the mood to play with pretty things, not be a computer geek..maybe next week.
Filters>Blur>Zoom motion blur. I moved the center to the middle of the flower and cranked the blurring factor up to 0.515 and left the other parameters at default.
If you wanted you could repeat this again.
I made a copy of the step 3 layer and applied Filters>Distorts>Whirl and Pinch using the default settings to get this:
I mad another duplicate of the step 3 image, moved it above the layer from step 4, and again used the Filter>Distorts>Whirl and Pinch, but for this layer I made the angle negative (I forgot to jot down the exact number, but I think it was around -200).
Not much to say about this, I just tested all of the various blend modes on the layer made in step 5 until I found ones I liked. Here are my two favorites:
It was fun to give this a try and the GIMP was quite easy to use to get the twirled effect. So much so that I may become addicted to abstraction.
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