Texture Tuesday

 For Kim Klassen's Texture Tuesday, a couple of pictures of black-eyed susans:

Beyond Beyond Day 28

Once again, it has been a long time since I've done any exercises in Kim Klassen's Beyond Beyond class. Day 28 was about tweaking textures to our liking in Camera Raw. I appreciated this exercise because I did not know before that you could do this. The one problem is knowing this trick might lead to way too many textures in my files!

Often I do want to tweak a texture, but I usually end up doing that by clipping other adjustment layers (such as black and white or levels) onto the texture while I am editing the photo that I am applying the texture to. To do this tweaking in Camera Raw is much more convenient and there are many more options.

I used Kim's Frosted texture (upper left) and created three additional versions. There is something different about my copy of Photoshop and Kim's so I could not figure out how to use the crop tool to expand the canvas and add some spacing between the textures, but I decided that was not that important, so I left it alone.

Below is an image I layered with a couple of the textures that were newly created from Kim's original texture. 

Texture Tuesday.. Free and Easy

For Kim's Texture Tuesday. This was edited with Lightroom, Photoshop and Radlab. I used one layer of Kim's texture 'jamal' at soft light, 79% opacity.

Texture Tuesday on Friday

I have not be posting on my blog for a while again. Of course it is not as if I have to, but because Kim's Texture Tuesday link-ups are open until Saturdays now and because summer texture tuesdays are all 'free and easy', I am doing a quick post. Happy Friday!

The above image was texture with a couple of layers of Kim's Aulneau texture from her July collection.

Texture Tuesday: Free and Easy

Summer cone flowers. Textured with a couple of layers of Kim's texture '401' and one layer of 'steelish'.

Texture Tuesday: Free and Easy for the Summer

It has been a while since I have posted anything on my blog or done any of Kim's challenges. I have been completely ignoring Beyond Beyond lately; I have not done any Texture Tuesday link up in weeks. I do not know why. I feel sort of unmotivated and, to be honest, that is eating me up because I have no right to not be motivated right now. I have had some completely amazing and inspiring experiences lately. Last year, I got to go to a Shutter Sisters event (Oasis) and this year, I was so lucky to be chosen (randomly) by the company I work for to go on a 2 week international volunteer trip. I went to Costa Rica just a few weeks ago. I volunteered in a nursing home and I met and connected with some amazing people. Both were wonderful experiences--all around--perfect, shall I say "magical". So now why am I feeling so uninspired? Why am I feeling so stuck? Why am I so unmotivated? Why am I NOT ready to take on the world?

Also, I am not depressed or anything like that. I'm perfectly content and I generally feel good about myself . . . I just lack a certain umpf lately, ya know?  Maybe I am just bored, but why should I be bored?  Or perhaps I am feeling guilty that I cannot hold onto the magic, to the passion after supposedly life altering experiences (which in the moment, they were) . . . life always just comes back to the mundane. Am I expecting too much?  . . . perhaps so.

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I did not take a lot of great pictures in Costa Rica. I wish I had taken more and I wish I had not been so disappointed in the ones I did take, but still, that was not why I was there. Above are two (very similar, I know) images from the beach in a place called Manual Antonio. I textured them with a few of Kim's textures--different blend modes, different opacities--just for fun. I have been adding textures to fewer of my photos these days, but I still love the process of adding textures to photos.

i knew it was you from the thumbnail

I do hear it, sometimes, from my contacts on Flickr--that oh-so-nice and flattering phrase, "I knew it was you from the thumbnail." I do not know that if I can really say that is because I developed a style uniquely my own. I think, perhaps not. I think it might instead be because I shoot the same subject matter over and over again, often in the same manner and with similar editing techniques applied.

There are leaves . . .sometimes with frost.

There is oatgrass--almost always with a texture or two added.

There are flowers -- done the same way many times over and over, with simple backgrounds, texure and posed stems.

There are dandelions, of course.

 . . . and lone dandelions seeds.

 

There are water drops after the rains.

And there is morning dew.

These are my subjects--over and over again.