I had fun over the fourth, playing with the continuous-fire mode of my camera. This pic is one result - I overlaid 4 pictures taken in quick succession to get a "multiple exposure" effect:

Smoke Bomb

Hey! What are you guys looking at?

Three Kids

Bored. Rained out. Brand new telescope, sitting and collecting dust. Ah, well.

My daughter's new friend

Temptation tastes like lettuce...

Captain, it appears to be a.... flower.

Just in case the grass catches fire.

So here's some pictures from this year's circus at Plymouth Meeting PA. As with the clown competition, I was working so pictures were kind of a catch-as-catch-can experience. Beginning with this: accidental self portrait. Really. It was an accident.

Finky is one of the guys who talked me into being a clown, but I have to say his clown costume looks like my work clothes.

The ring master was there, of course, along with the elephant, but my favorites were the acrobats,  they jumped off swings - which I had never seen before - and did the traditional rope and ring routines, I am always in awe of these folks, so I took one more picture just for, you know, the memories.

I'm not going to flood Photographica with pictures from the clown competition - particularly since I didn't take some of them - but I thought you might get a kick out of knowing that I spent the weekend portraying Ben Franklin . This year marks Ben's 300th birthday and his adopted hometown has been celebrating that fact - so instead of competing, I worked as a greeter, guide and walking entertainment during the competition.

If you're curious, you can find the whole photo set here - the quality is uneven because I was working, so pictures tend to be those I could grab quickly.

Also, for your background image pleasure, here's a picture I did take: Balloons

Side note - preview is not working for me and I'm getting these images that say "I steal pictures" instead of my photos. I hope this works....

There were a couple of discussions on creating frames for your images with software - for those of us who like prints, I found a tutorial on how to mat your photos "in real life"

How I Cut a Mat

I haven't had a chance to try this myself and it does talk about buying a "real" mat cutter to get the beveled edges.

Well, it's an emotion - but I'm not sure which one...

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Here I am, desperately trying to catch up with the last three challenges and y'all start a fourth one while I'm not looking.

Well, Fine.

Let's see. The challenges are: Architecture, Reflections, Signs and now Strangers. I think I've gotten them covered this week:

The Capitol at night and Washington Monument at Night cover the Reflections and Architecture categories, and I'll throw these in as proof I know how to take pictures during the day, too:

Washington Monument by Day, and Udvar-Hazy Center  

For the Signs challenge, I offer this cheating entry:

Reflections on a Memorial

and for a straight reflection I offer this:

Reflecting on War.

Now, for the subject of strangers, I'm afraid I can only offer one stranger, and one person doing something strange:

Making Memories

Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

On that last picture, I swear I've no connection to that girl, I don't care what her mother says!

So, I'm going a bit hog-wild playing with my camera to see what it can do, then playing with my old copy of PS elements to see what I can do with that.

Here's a before-and-after PSE that I did today;
before
after

The hardcopy print I did came out being a little too saturated in the skin tones but I like it - as always, feedback is strongly encouraged, I'd like suggestions on how to improve my work!

So, after someone recently posted a how-to on making a real photographers backdrop, I decided to play with making them digitally.

One of them was made with a scanner, one with my camera, both were then heavily modified to get that backdrop look:

 Blue background
Brown background

Here's a picture I used working with a modified version of the blue background: Mary in Uniform

Oh - if you really want to know, the background in the portrait is the blue background - which was originally a scan of a crumpled up t-shirt. Brown background started out as a macro-focused picture of some mulch.

Do you think this is a useful techinique?

As a photo, this is probably worthless - but I'm having fun and I have to share.

I discovered this morning that my 20 year old Cokin filters will attach just fine to my 2006 Lumix camera. Most of the filters make no sense in a digital world (who needs a graduated tobacco filter when you have photoshop?) but two are as useful as ever - the polarizer and the macro adapter - and they both work fine with the Lumix! W00t!

So, I've been playing all morning with my 6" tall minitripod, the macro adapter and various things laying around my desk. This is the result:

Fear The Mighty Gundam War Machine - even if it's only and inch and a half tall....

Blue Basket

I really like this image; the original basket was the red color of the central stripe, but the lack of contrast was boring, so I overlaid with blue (my favorite color) then cut through the blue to the original basket to create the stripe.

Kisses for Valentine's Day

Winter Blahs

I've been taking snapshots since I was 6 or 7 - more than 30 years. In my 20's I went through a mildly-serious photographer-wanna-be phase, but life, children, the sheer hell of managing boxes of negatives and a perceived lack of talent (on my own part) meant that that time faded away.

Recently I've been trying to get back into it with a new gift - a Panasonic Lumix camera.  The camera is nice, better in most ways than my old Nikon 995, but I still feel like my pictures are... lacking. Some of it is technical

These pictures are basically my best recent attempts at using the Lumix and then cleaning up the results with PSE 2.0. Any feedback is appreciated.

Probably my best picture this year

Ridiculously cute puppy

As you might tell, I'm fond of a soft-focus approach; which PSE makes easy; duplicate the image layer, cut a hole for the face, blur the rest of the image and mix the result.

 Troll Junior, black and white Same, in color

This gentleman hates having his picture taken and is suffering the beginnings of teen skin problems. Between the acne and the way the camera seems to pick up every wanna-be whisker I'm having a terrible time getting a good picture of him. These pictures are unposed random snaps. Any ideas?

All 4 of these pictures are heavily re-touched to clear up his skin and hide some of the incipent mustache and sideburns (which, I swear, are too pale to see IRL but seem to jump into glowing detail when I take his picture). I use the black and white because I thought it helped with the over-red skin.

Troll Junior, second pose Same, but black and white

And, lastly, a tragic photo showing the human drama of our recent blizzard:

buried alive!