Sunny Flower Day

Today might be one of the last warm days of the year, so I thought I'd have a little fun with my Jerusalem artichokes.

Okay - that sounds a little strange...

I thought I'd have a little fun playing around with a picture of my Jerusalem artichokes in Photoshop.

Much better...

These are the second to last vegetable from our gardens - the last being the Brussels sprouts, which hopefully will be ready just in time for Thanksgiving.  Even though the Jerusalem artichokes practically take over the entire garden in the spring and I have to weed them out of everywhere like mad to keep them contained in their little section, I keep them around for this fantastic display in the Fall.

I love walking through the parterre and having their sunny flowers dancing in the breeze way above my head.  It makes me feel like a kid again - running through meadows, picking flowers, months of vacation time and convincing my little sister it was her turn to do my chores.  (Sorry sis!)

So when the sun came out this morning and it warmed up like August, I just had to play --- even if it was only on the computer.

A Rose By Any Other Name

I don't know what it is about some of the flowers in our gardens, but they make me want to take out everything from the background except for the bloom.

Maybe it's the brilliant color.  But probably it's the way that the light shines through the petals.  It looks like they're absorbing the sun directly.

This rose looks to me as if it is made out of porcelain.  Its' petals seem so delicate and fragile.  Even though I know that it would take a bit of effort to tear them - and I'd probably get pricked by a thorn when I tried.

I never had much luck with roses before I found this Knockout Rose.  They would get black spot or aphids would eat them to the stem.  I was really good at growing rose canes, not so much at getting blooms.  This one blooms from May through --- well, as long as the weather holds.

All in all, this Knockout Rose lives up to its' name.  It's October and there are still a lot of blooms growing.  Some parts of the bush have gotten a bit of mildew, but the overall plant is thriving.  That's what I like about disease resistant rose bushes most of all.

Oh - and a Midnight Muffin Madness note.  My DH is bringing pie tomorrow (pumpkin - I'll post), so the muffins will resume next week.

Color Cards

You know I just love these mitts.  And it's not just the mitts - it's the packaging for the pattern.  So I was wondering what it was about this particular package that really caught my eye - and I realized that it was the color palette.

But which colors?

So as I was going through some blogs that I visit, I found a post on The Mother Huddle that showed how to extract colors from a photo using PicMonkey.  I had to try it.

I took my little picture from Blue Sky Alpaca's pattern, trimmed it a bit, added arrows and picked the colors out of the photo that really caught my eye, then just put the color number in text on top of the arrow.

Pretty neat, huh!

Okay - maybe it's an acquired taste.  But I thought it was really fun!

I wonder how it would handle some of my daylily pictures?  (I see a fun snowy winter weekend project in my future!)

Horsing Around

 

I was playing with an online photo editor just to see what it would do.  I know, too much free time!

So the photo on the left is the original one from my camera - and the one on the right is what the online photo software thinks that the photo should be.

I think that the camera was closer to the color reality of the shot.  There was a bit more blue in the grass.  The dark brown horse had some lovely red highlights in its' mane and the dappled horses coat was more golden.

As far as the sharpening of the picture, the online photo editor did a better job.  The day was really clear and the details of the horses were very crisp.

I can see how folks would like playing around with the online photo editor - they had a few neat filters built in to the application, but I wasn't totally sold on it.

Maybe I just like doing things by hand - or I'm a bit of a control freak - but I prefer to just use Photoshop to get the pictures to reflect what I see.

I'll keep looking for an app that automatically makes my pictures look like what my eyes see, however. I'm not adverse to saving time!

Picture Day

Do you know how sometimes you just want to take a picture of your kid (or pup) and no matter how you try to convince them (or her) to just sit still in the perfect light - they won't?  No matter what I tried, our girl would only sit nicely in absolute shadow.

Then I thought - the heck with it! And I showed her how to work the camera.  (Tap nose here - it's within her skill set.)

So she did!

She thought it was really fun.  Just touch the screen and you get to see a pup that looks just like you do!

What a hoot!  I swear she's laughing.  After all, it's not everyday that she gets to play with electronics - especially after that unfortunate incident with the printer cable.  Let's just say it was not a chew toy.

Finally she settled down and took a nice self-portrait.

That's my girl!  Not bad for a budding photographer, don't you think?

(Disclaimer:  My DH thought this was a *really bad* idea to teach her how to play with my ipad.  Just thought you should know...)

A Different Perspective

We got a professional photographer to take pictures of all of the gardens for our tour this year - so sweet of him to donate his time and photographs (Daniel MacDougal - great photographer!).  So I thought I'd share this photo of our carriage house.

It was converted from a carriage house in 1942, but over the years the major repairs were put on hold.  My DH has taken it under his wing and it's slowly being restored.  We've found little surprises along the way - carpenter ant damage so severe that one of the corners of the house had to be completely rebuilt, waterfalls in the upstairs led to a new roof, a complete failure of the plumbing system led to a new manifold system.

Of course, I love doing the window boxes!  It's the one part of the garden that I can completely change every year and just have fun with!  This year I really wanted to bring out the reds in the stonework - so I used coleus to make a splash.

It's strange to look at pictures of our gardens that were taken by someone else.  It feels almost voyeuristic in a way.  He saw things in a way that I hadn't, finding interest even in an old bird house that I find as ugly as sin, but haven't had the heart to toss - so I just put it in one of the garden beds to get it out of the way.

From his perspective it looks charming!  I would have never noticed that aspect of it.

I can't wait to see the rest of the pictures, though.  If this is how he saw our gardens, the rest must be amazing.