Tag Archives: photo challenge

Which do you prefer?

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I’ve written before about the 52 Week Photo Challenge online class that I’m taking from Ricky Tims. Best class ever! This week’s assignment is how to add a text overlay to a photo.—yet another cool thing that you can do in Photoshop that I had no idea existed.

I’ve taken 3 photos (Splish is one of them) and I like them all. If you have a bit of time, please do click here and then leave a comment on this post telling me which one you like the best.

Choosing the word(s) was the hardest part of this photo challenge. The same thing is true when you add words to a quilt, as I wrote about in this post. Text is powerful. It draws the eye and, no matter how big or small it is, what you say can dominate a design. The quilt that I made after that post is called Say Something (below), which is in The Quilter’s Practical Guide To Color.

The words take up a small percentage of the space on the quilt, but they are the focal point, dominating the design. This is good to remember when you want to make what may be a simple quilt into a more complex statement.

Update: Thank you all for your comments! I’ve decided to submit the car photo because I like it as is. After reading your comments, I think I need to make the word “splish” more legible in the water photo and I don’t have time today to do that. So, the car photo it is and I can mark that off the list. Thanks!

Kahekili Beach, Maui…

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We sat on the beach today. We read—I’m reading The Martian and it is a terrific beach read! We swam and/or snorkeled. We sat and looked at the waves and the people. It was a really nice day!

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I’m working on this week’s Photo Challenge which is to take a photo that tells a story. Here are some of the one’s I have accumulated… What do you see?

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The photo challenge continues…

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On January 8 I wrote about Ricky Tims’ 52 week photo challenge. I am loving it! We just finished Week 7 which was a black and white challenge. This is my photo:

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I knew I was going to learn a lot, but am happy to report that I’m learning stuff that I didn’t know that I didn’t know. That’s not a typo. It is both exciting and humbling to learn new things, especially when it makes your brain stretch. I can feel mine stretching!

Ricky uses smugmug, a photo sharing/storage site. I followed suit and have a smugmug page of my own where I’ve been uploading my weekly challenge photos. There’s a link to my smugmug page over there in the right-hand column if you’d like to see my photos. I hope Ricky offers this class again next year—I heartily recommend it to any of you interested in photography.

And, as long as I’m talking about links over there to the right, you might want to scan through them. I’ve added some new ones. For example, if you are interested in Japanese fabric, and other fabrics not usually found in quilt shops, check out the link for Marcy Tilton.

And, as you click through my links, if you find any that aren’t working, please do let me know. I try to keep them current but… well, you know. Life gets in the way of doing everything.

I took the photography challenge…

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First, an update on the iPhone that took a dip in the toilet… it works just like it did when it was new! Twelve hours in a food dehydrator did the trick. Oh happy, happy day.

In other news, I am on Ricky Tims’ newsletter list and on January 4th he announced the 52 Week Photography Challenge for 2015. I’ve had very a good camera for several years, a Nikon D90, that I’ve always meant to learn how to use, but I have never found the time (or discipline) to do it. The camera works well in auto focus mode, but not well enough.

Ricky is an excellent teacher and he knows a lot about photography. The class is very reasonably priced at just under $100 for 52 different lessons. It didn’t take me longer than a day to decide to just do it.

The first class is about selective focus. I have already learned more about how my camera works (and how I should be processing photos) than I would have imagined to be possible.

I’ve taken my series of pictures for this week. I don’t claim that my composition of toys* is particularly wonderful, but I was able to move the focal point around! I decided what was in focus, not the camera. Success feels good!

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If any of you are interested in learning more about photography, I would encourage you to consider this class. I can already tell that it’s going to be good. There are requirements… you have to have a good camera. Ricky recommends that you have the newest versions of Photoshop and Lightroom. There’s more, but those are the most expensive requirements. If this class sounds good to you, now is definitely the time to sign up.

* The toy figures are from a set of ‘horrified movie victims’ that I’ve had a long time. A small set is available for purchase here. My set has more figures, but I have not found it online. I did find a glow in the dark zombie set that I wouldn’t mind owning :-).