love that shot and a leather giveaway!

>> Tuesday, August 31, 2010

083010_LukesFirstDayofCollege_2_600

Luke’s First Day of College
Tutorial Used: “How to Apply a Texture to a Photo” by Misti Tracy


Happy last day of August everyone!

Many of you have already sent children off for a new school year, are still preparing to or, perhaps, you are homeschooling!
 
As most of you know, my babes are all grown up now and my youngest, twins, turned 21 last month.  One of the twins, Luke, has just started his first year at our local junior college and he is SO excited! I am equally as excited for him!

Luke stopped by after work yesterday, late afternoon, to share the good news with us.  I knew that he was enrolling (I filed FASFA apps for both Luke and John last Spring), but did not know that he would be attending his first class quite so soon! (climbing out from beneath the proverbial rock!)

My oldest son, Matt and Luke share a house together. Luke is in the beginning stages of trying to manage college classes, a full-time job as well as keeping house! Luke has been known to be the “mom” around his home! This not only entails his looking out after anyone who enters through the front door, but also keeping the household running as smoothly as humanly possible when occupied with ALL boys. Uhm, I mean ... MEN! LOL!

Until recently, there had been four or five young men living under the same roof. Needless to say, things were a bit chaotic most of the time and Luke was giving serious thought to relocating himself for he knew he could not go to school and deal with traffic in-and-out of the house at any given moment, 24/7. Well, as it turns out, two of the roomies decided to move on the end of July. I could hear the sign of relief in Luke’s voice as he was thinking that things would now be “all good” with just he and his brother sharing space! He, he ... okay, I’ll be nice, but y’all know how brothers can be at times too, eh? ROFL!

Anyhoo, Luke’s visit yesterday naturally led this Mama to snap a few shots to preserve this special and most wondrous occasion, as well as marking my first project as a new CT for an incredibly wonderful site I joined several months ago, Love that Shot! 

As a digital designer, I love working with textures, so the first tutorial that caught my eye was, “How to Apply a Texture to a Photo” by the lovely and talented Misti Tracy, co-owner of Love that Shot. I have tried playing around with this on my own a few times in the past, however, I struggled with the fine art of using the lasso tool to achieve the result that I was looking for.  Misti’s tutorial was the key to unlocking the magic of the lasso tool for me in loosely outlining my subject and using a bit more feathering than I had been working with prior!  Thanks again Misti! *wink*

Now, as with any tutorial, you learn the basics of how to accomplish the meat of it and then, of course, you experiment! That is what I did with the photo of Luke above. The background was very busy and distracting and Luke got lost amongst the bookcase full of books here in my little office space, so I worked on cropping, angling and blurring out the distracting background as well as applying textures to my photo!  And, I even decided to keep some texture on Luke’s face!

I am not thrilled about only having my cell phone camera to snap with at the present time (5 MP), but have risen above the disappointment with my use of post-production tools to give me an end result that I can live with!  Although, I am still looking to replace my camera, which started having some issues while I was in Washington in, hopefully, the very near future!

I am thankful to have found Misti and her sister, Michelle at Love that Shot and am looking forward to improving my skills in photography as well as some post-production in Photoshop!

If you are looking for some fun and unique ways to improve upon your photos, whether from behind the camera or via some manipulation in your photo editing program, come and check out what the girls have been up to at Love that Shot!  Misti and Michelle not only offer up some cool free stuff, but they also offer a monthly membership which gives members access to all of their tutorials, including supplies to work on each one with, along with exclusive discounts on digital products and FREE registration to their workshops! There is an active forum too! Comment, share, ask questions and connect with others who share your passion!

Oh, and while you are checking out the Love that Shot site, Misti and Michelle are having a new giveaway this week! Do y’all like leather? You’ll love what their talented brother has to offer us! Details can be found HERE!

Now, y’all know what tomorrow is, right? Well, besides being the first day of September! The September Blog Train, departs! WOOT, WOOT ... TOOT, TOOT ... stay-tuned! It is going to be a Fall Carnival for sure!

Until we meet again ...

Love and hugs,

Linda XOXO

P.S. Live Writer has not been working properly for me since my return from Washington and my working on my blog makeover.  Please excuse the lack of paragraphs when my feed is burned before I can get into Blogger and make corrections!  If someone can shed some light on this problem, I shall be most grateful. When I tick “edit using theme”, I have absolutely no control over the placement of anything!  However, when I type up my post without using the theme, everything appears normal before my eyes, but this is not the case when I hit the publish button!

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thought i had a slipped "disqus" ...

>> Wednesday, August 25, 2010


But, I do believe that all is well y'all! LOL!

I wanted to give you a heads up to my new commenting widget by the lovely Disqus!

I have had an account with Disqus since last year as I frequent many techy type websites that use Disqus, however, what I did not know, until renovating my blog, is that one can use the Disqus widget on Blogger too!  WOOT!

I hope that you all will find this user-friendly and understand why I have chosen to go with Disqus rather than Blogger's traditional commenting system.  I can now reply to you personally! YAY!

I've chosen my long-time and good friend Carole's comment as an example to how I am able to reply back directly beneath your posted comments:


I do believe this will make for an incredible method to my madness of trying to keep up with all of you lovelies and with a very personal touch.  It has pained me not to be able to do this in the past.  Honestly!

You can post using your Facebook login, Twitter, Disqus (of course!), Yahoo and a few others.  The only downfall that I have found thus far is that you cannot use your Blogger ID, but you can sign in anonymously if the need be.  Just make sure to sign your name so I know who I am replying to or, you can sign up for an account with Disqus! *smile*

I love that Disqus keeps track of the comments we leave out and about as we peruse the Internet too.  That is, if the site/blog we are visiting is also using Disqus - very cool!


If you are not signed in, the window below will open and ask you to identify yourself, but you must have already typed out your comment otherwise, Disqus will ask you to!

If there is ever a particular thread of comments that you would like to keep up with, or to see when I have replied to your questions, requests, etc., you can subscribe here as well.  There are a couple of options for subscribing to comments.  You may subscribe by email or by RSS feed.


If you have any questions or find anything out of sorts, please feel free to post them in the comments section so that I can reply to you immediately upon checking for new comments.  How cool is that!   

I'm still tweaking Disqus as I find a couple of things are not showing up that I asked for, so keeping my fingers and toes crossed that I do NOT end of with a slipped "Disqus" after all!  ROFL!

I'm SO happy ... *big grin*

Now, off to finish creating my goodies for the blog train and to work on my new siggy!

Learning brings about growth, which brings about change.  I love it!

What is something that you have learned recently that has led to growth and change for you?

Until we meet again ...

Love and hugs,

Linda

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extreme blog makeover and some "ping" gone wrong!

>> Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Hi y'all!

Just a quick post to apologize for an old blog post that found it's way into your inbox sometime yesterday!  ARGH!

I've been having to reformat older posts due to the new template and fonts I am working with.  I decided to go back as far as January for some uniformity.

I started using Windows Live Writer at the beginning of the year and had posted several times using Robert's work laptop after having my gall bladder surgery, which confined me to the sofa recliner for a short while.  In trying to go back and alter margins, black reflections on photos and such that went awry during the new template upload, along with transferring files from my flash drive to my PC, somehow I ended up with a double post from February 28th!

Before I figured out that the date had changed to August 23rd, my post had already been published and pinged to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn!  HELP! :(

I am SO sorry for the inconvenience and shall keep my eyes open for any future posting issues before I hit the publish button!

I am almost finished tweaking things around here and thank you SO much for your patience and your continued support!

I am preparing for the September Blog Train, which will be departing and traveling throughout Scrapland come September 1st!  I shall meet y'all at the station! LOL!

Oh, and yes, I shall be posting photos of my new and precious granddaughter, Katelyn Rose, just as soon as I get my blog in order! If I knew what I know now when I first started blogging, I would not be cleaning up such a horrible mess! ROFL! And, the clean up shall be an ongoing process!

Have a fabulous week everyone and until we meet again, Bon Scrapatit!

Love and hugs,

Linda :D

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