Here’s this week’s Team-up Thursday diptych. I love silhouette photos, and Nancy’s of the horses is so lovely. The sky was just perfect.

Between exercise class and heading off to another busy day away from home, I thought I’d tried another of Shimelle’s prompts. This one was to try using textures with your photos. I’ve played around with textures a few times, and see lots of examples on blogs that I like a lot. Shimelle’s directions gave me some new ways to play with them. Before today, I usually just played with opacity and levels to get the look I wanted. Today I played around with the blending modes, and it certainly gives one a lot of options! I’m not totally happy with any of these but would like to hear your thoughts about improving them.

Here’s the first image I played with from our trip to Vermont a week ago.

Here’s the first adaptation. I used a texture called “branded” that I downloaded a while ago. Sadly I have no information on where I got it or who created it. I decreased the opacity to 61% and then ran the Pioneer Woman Lovely and Etheral action on it.

The next one uses Kim Klassen’s Simple Things texture at 51% opacity.

Lastly, I played with the photo I took of the rope at Shelbourne Museum.

For this I used a texture called Brown Paper with the opacity at 82%.

Hope to be back with some layouts, but it probably won’t be until tomorrow since our book group meets tonight at our house. I have the photos chosen, just need to get them on the paper!

I love playing with aperture and depth of field. For some reason when I was learning to use my SLR my understanding of aperture came pretty readily. I didn’t have as much success with shutter speed. I understood the concept but it took me a long time before I could get the settings the way I wanted them. I recently bought a new box of crayons specifically for photo practice so I decided they’d be a great way to play with depth of field. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the photos, but they may come in handy for a layout or something some day. I had a good time regardless.

f/1.8

f/1.4

There’s not much difference in aperture here but just the slight change puts more crayons in focus in the first photo.

We had a great day today. We took a good friend sailing, and it was perfect weather for it. I’m really a fair weather sailor. I don’t like the water to be too rough, and I don’t like to be cold. The winds were coming out of the south today so it was just wonderful.

Another pet peeve of mine is all the motor boats that create large wakes and make our little sailboat (one of the smallest on Lake Ontario) tip and bump. Today this sailboat in the distance was about our only company. Fine with me!

And one last photo for today for Amy. The stuffed zucchini was excellent. Tracy is a very reluctant zucchini eater unless it comes in the form of bread or cake. Even he ate all of his and said he’d be willing to have it again. It’s not a great photo because I forgot to take the photo until we’d already dug into it. Thanks for the suggestion, Amy, we’ll be having it again.

I’ve managed to catch up with the assignments for Love Your Photos, Love Your Pages. The first layout is based on a sketch from Prompt 4. It’s quite simple, but it took a really long time for me to finally arrive at an arrangement of paper I liked. The photos are two that I took for an earlier assignment.

Cardstock: Bazzil; patterned paper: Jillibean and October Afternoon; butterfly button: Flair (American Craft); journaling circle: Jillibean; alphas: Nerdy Glittler (Sassafrass Lass) & Mini Market Stickers (October Afternoon); date stamp (Staples)

As soon as I read yesterday’s prompt about adding text or a title to a photograph I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Here’s the layout I did once I got the photograph done.

Patterned paper: Paper Loft; cardstock: from scrap file; chipboard sticker: Mama-Razzi (Bo Bunny)

I forgot to upload the layout so it can be enlarged so here is the journaling:

I have always had a good eye for color. Once I started making cards and scrapbooking my sense of design and space really improved. But nothing has improved my eye as much as taking photographs. Now I see things I would have missed totally before I started taking photos every day. I love this quote because it has been so true for me.

And last, a layout of our garden with photos I took this evening. The garden looks fabulous, and we are enjoying lettuce, zucchini, and cucumbers as well as lots of basil. There are even a couple of pepper plants that are looking much better and have developed some flowers. If all the tomatoes survived, I’ll be doing a lot of canning later this summer!  The pole beans have crawled up the poles and attached themselves to the sides of the fence as well. As I was catching up with blogs this weekend I came across a series of posts on Write. Click. Scrapbook. by Moon Ko. There was lots of inspiration but even nicer, a set of free templates. As soon as I saw this one I knew it would work perfectly for a garden layout. I’m planning to go back and do one for May and June as well.

Patterned Paper: Bo Bunny; Journaling spot: Scenic Route; template: Moon Ko

This challenge at Moxie Fab has been on my “To Do” list ever since I saw it posted. I love this Hero Arts bicycle stamp, but haven’t put it to much use. I finally got to it today, just in the nick of time. Here are two cards for the challenge. For the first card, I stamped the bike, then cut it out with a rectangle Nestability. I left it in the die and sponged the sky and the ground. The basket and bike were colored with Prisma colored pencils, and the flowers were created with Flower Soft. After mounting the image, I added the felt cloud.

Cardstock: Ripe Avocado & Vintage Cream (PTI); Patterned Paper: Road Map (October Afternoon); Stamps: Bicycle (Hero Arts) & Sentiment Everyday Button Bits (PTI); Flower Soft: Sage & Raspberry Fizz; tag punch (trimmed down); Brad (Kaiser); silver pearls (Mrs. Grossman); twill: Ripe Avocado (PTI); cloud die (PTI); Vintage Cream felt

For this card I stamped the image on a page from an old Little House in the Prairie book that I picked up at an used book store just for this purpose. I don’t know that I would have ever put Orange Zest and Scarlet Jewel together, but they matched the ribbon perfectly and turned out to be a good combination.

Cardstock: Orange Zest & Scarlet Jewel (PTI); Patterned paper (A Muse); ribbon from stash; Stamps: Bicycle (Hero Arts) & Sentiment Birds of a Feather (PTI); Nestability label: Scrap-Mart exclusive die (Spellbinders); Prisma colored pencils

With all the excitement of Creativity Bootcamp, and trying to get the California photos scrapped I’m late again in posting my Weekly Gratitude pages. Here are the last two weeks:

Creativity Boot Camp starts this weekend. I first saw a reference to it on Mel’s blog and signed up. I’m both curious about it and looking forward to it. It’s designed so that you can participate in a variety of mediums, although it appears that it will be best to choose one. I’ve decided to wait until the first prompt on Sunday to decide whether to use photography (most likely) or scrapbooking.  It’s free and you can check it out here.

This week’s prompt was Signs. I took my photo in Davis, CA in March at a UC Davis Facilities parking lot. Nancy’s was taken in Hawaii during one of her vacations there. We don’t ever talk about the photos ahead of time so it’s funny how they go together this week:  Stop, Watch Out, Coconuts May Fall! Other folks in the group interpreted the prompt much less literally posting photos of the first signs of summer, for example.

I seem to be doing these in sets recently. Here are the last two weeks: