7/21 A Couple of July Photos

7/19 Posing Loon - Felt a bit sea sick after focusing while kayaking. 

Centered Face

Where have I been? Working, working, working.....I manage to get the daily picture taken but there's not a lot of creativity. I continue taking pictures to practice. All of my photos are in my flickr albums. If you know me, then you know how to get to the photos. I will try to at least post once a week for a few of my favorites of the week.

Odd Number of flowers

 When I upgraded Lightroom, I upgraded to the Adobe creative studio which includes photoshop. This means I have more tools to learn that will help improve my photos. See the nails in the face picture to the right? So easy to remove in photoshop and that's just a tiny bit of what can be done in photoshop. Another learning experience, but it has already come in handy on my work computer since I have a couple of pages that I need to maintain on that site.

And the Obligatory Hummingbird picture for July

The challenge to getting my pictures done each day is the light. Taking pictures in the early evening doesn't provide a lot of light to be able to use fast speeds for hummingbird pictures. But considering the lack of light, at least I now know how to make changes to the settings to at least get the humming bird in focus.

CY365 Pictures of the Day

Fun with Textures- Day lilies gone wild

1/10 Habit

 Morning Walk with Friends

1/10 Photograph Habit

Quirk / New or Old / Manner

Flicker Picture of the Day 10/365

There are worse habits than walking. I have a couple of friends that are willing to walk in all the seasons. This is Chloe, my neighbor's dog who also likes to walk and the woods are her favorite.

It looks so cold, especially since I am playing catch up with my blog from Florida.

More winter fun and exercise- Moving firewood

Summertime Catch Up

I fell behind this week with a party, a real estate photo job and work. And since I am whining, the heat was not conducive to being on my lap top until tonight when we finally put the air conditioner in downstairs. Plus, due to yesterday's thunderstorm that caused a microburst 1/2 mile from here, we were without electricity until the middle of the night. I continued to take a picture a day and managed to get those posted to Captureyour365 except for yesterday's due to the weather.

What did you miss this week? A lot of stretching of the prompts, enjoy!

In the Shade

6/27 Photograph In the Shade

Cool Down / Under the Umbrella / Relax

My son and his friend happily went into the shade for this picture, kind of hard to take a picture of such tall guys without cutting something off. I guess there are worse things than feet to lose in a picture. At least it's better than the picture someone took of them at the wedding in a couple pose. Can you believe I actually had a cashier ask me if they were brothers? 

Graduation Portrait

6/28 Photograph Traditional Wear

Native Dress / Classic / Historic

No traditional gown here, but a happy high school graduate, my friend's L's daughter. It was a fun party with games and Karaoke. L and I got up to do Paradise by the Dashboard light. Lucky to have a beautiful evening for the party as we were outside the whole time.

Picking Up My Golf Ball

6/29 Photograph Clean Up

Pick up / Collect / Compile

This was an iPhone picture as that was part of the prompt, along with using apps for processing. 

We went golfing in the Lakes Region after I took pictures of a former lab employee's house for a real estate listing. It was harder than I thought as I had to do some editing afterwards to level the pictures. I read up on how to take the photos and my tripod came in handy. 

Downtown Advertisements

6/30 Photograph Graffiti Walls

Art / Markings / Urban

Better than graffiti in my mind and this is a prominent wall downtown. I wonder if they will let it stay when they do their next revitalization project of downtown. 

Iced Coffee

7/1 Photograph Refreshing

A Frozen Treat / Quenching / Revitalizing 

This photo was taken with a tripod and a napkin was used for the "placemat". I should have straightened it a bit more. The camera was set up with the drive mode to take 6 pictures. The problem then was , do I pick a glass 1/2 empty or 1/2 full?

I picked the photo above because it has ice and the coffee is just flowing over the ice. 

It was a beautiful day and I did manage to get some pictures of the flowers in the front yard. 

These were taken with a macro lens.

Essential Summer Flower

7/2 Photograph The Essentials

Necessary / Fundamental / A Must

This was one of my non- promo shots for the week. I was busy getting out of the house early for work and then when I got back in the afternoon, it was in the middle of the storm. Then the lights went out.

This is the first good Clematis bloom out front. The gardens there seem to be a few weeks behind and this is the second year for this plant. It will be gorgeous next week. 

Patriotic Bird House?

7/3 Photograph All- American

Red, White, & Blue / Baseball / Apple Pie

This is the only patriotic thing here at my house except for a large American flag that we don't have a pole for.  And yes, I have taken a  picture or two of this before, but now there is color in the back yard. The bee balm will be blooming this weekend and will be a pretty contrast to the yellows, purples and white already in the garden. The Cone flowers are getting ready to bloom also with this one being the first:

I did have my camera with me today and was hoping that our town's bandstand would have some patriotic bunting which it did not, therefore, another picture from the garden. And there you have it, a week of pictures. 

Travel and Bubbles

Minivan for travel

6/4 Photograph Up North

Destination / Outing / Travel

Buoyant Bubbles

6/5 Photograph Floating By

Buoyant / Suspended / Drifting

Yesterday was a day that I almost missed in taking a picture. I was gone for most of the day golfing in a tournament and then golfing in my league. It was fun, I got to meet some really nice golfers who are at my level and even though we had some bad shots, overall it was a great day of golf. They invited me to their club's tournament in July and we are planning on trying to team up for the rest of the summer. It was my first time golfing in the state's women's golf association and I was nervous about all the rules and playing with strangers, but it worked out great. The prompt was for traveling and my minivan all set for the summer was good enough at 9 PM when I got home. It actually works.

Today's prompt was a little harder today as the email this morning was about clouds floating. As I drove up to work today, all I saw was overcast gray clouds hanging in the sky, no floating going on there. I even stopped by the town pond where I could actually see the sky and even though there was more clouds to be seen and even a surprise heron, I wasn't thrilled with the pictures.  The clouds still seemed to be hanging, nothing buoyant in those pictures. 

Heron landing

At least I had thought ahead and picked up bubbles to have a fall back plan. When I got home, I enlisted the help of my son. "Can you help me with today's picture and blow some bubbles?" His reply, "Seriously?" followed by a large sigh. Me: "You loved this when you were three." After about 5 minutes and many out of focused bubbles, I got a couple of good bubble shots and then decided on my son blowing bubbles as the perfect buoyant picture. It has a good composition with him along one of the imaginary third lines with negative space in front of him for the bubbles. 

One Iris is finally blooming in the front garden. Just one, with the rest getting ready. Still loving my macro lens, can you tell?

Waiting for a Sunny Day

 Waiting for a Sunny Day

 5/1 Photography Healthy Vision

Get an Exam / Wear Sunglasses / Protect Your Eyes

It has been a very busy couple of days with a weekend trip to Stowe, Vermont for a cousin's wedding along with downloading a new photography software program, Lightroom 5. Both activities took time and the blogging took a back seat to everything else. But I did take plenty of pictures in the past 4 days to share.

During the month of May, the Captureyour 365 project is partnering with the National Eye Institute for Healthy Vision for the month. There will be a few prompts with eyes included in the prompt suggestions for May. The first prompt started off with Healthy Vision and I had taken a few photos of me with glasses on in the car and all got rejected. Then I thought about just using sun glasses with a hat/visor as subjects alone.  When I am out in the sun I always have my sun glasses on and if I am golfing, I add the hat or visor to protect my eyes. The picture that I ended up with is one that that I really like.  The curve of the glasses with the reflection of the bare trees on the backdrop of the white visor makes a visually appealing photo. It was a raw, cloudy day where I ended up cleaning out the front yard gardens just waiting for the sun to come out. 

After cleaning the yard, I gave myself some time to download the Lightroom 5 program which I am glad that I did! There was a glitch with putting in the activation code which resulted in a phone call to Adobe Support. They were helpful, but it took time. The program requires a different mind set on cataloguing photos while it also has editing capabilities. I ordered a book, Photoshop Lightroom 5 by Rob Sylvan and Nat Coalson. I chose this book, because Rob Sylvan is an online instructor at The Perfect Picture School of Photography where I had taken my photoshop elements course that I thought was well taught. When I start back working again, I hope to take the lightroom class, in the mean time I will be teaching myself with the book, on-line tutorials, websites and through trial and error.