Good morning everyone. We missed the brunt of the recent hurricane, just got a little rain. South of us were not so lucky though.

Thinking about entering the annual Artist Guild competition and trying to pick 2 images. I have about 6 selected so far, but I think these are the top 3 contenders. I need to eliminate one of them. I might do a little edit tweaking in PS once I select the 2 I plan to enter, for example cleaning up some of the trash in image2.

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I'm bad.
I am sorry.
I was up north for a while and wasn't checking in and then when I got back I got busy with a quilting project I had to get done.
I have not been taking ANY photos and didn't have anything new to share.
These are poor excuses and I apologize for my lack of participation.

Today, after missing the last two outings with my photo club, I will be attending a photo shoot with a few of them.  Detroit just finished their famous  MOTOR CITY Car Cruise two weeks ago. I did not attend, but there are other cities in the area that have the same thing but on a much smaller scale.  So, tomorrow night I will be at such an event hoping to get some new and good photos to share with you. 

I need to take some time to catch up to see what you all have been up to. But that will have to wait till later as it is past 1 am now.
But before I go to bed, I wanted to start this daily and share this little photo I took about a week ago when we were up at our trailer.

LORELL

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Another Taco Tuesday here - a couple of street soft tacos sounds real good for today's dinner.

Taken last Saturday morning on my early walk...

   

OSIM, folks. (That's kinda like TGIF, but altered for a Monday.)

During yesterday's early walk I saw something worth photographing.  And I decided to show the original photo plus two different crops.

1) The original, with no editing other than to add a little clarity in Camera Raw - not bad for essentially SOOTC...

   

I saw that I'd need to flip it horizontally; that was better but I still had a problem: the arcing red blossoms were way too close to the right edge.

So in PSE I added space to the right edge. But then I needed to fill it realistically. I didn't think the Clone Stamp tool was the best way to proceed, so using the Rectangular Selection tool to select various parts of the image, then pasted each selection into the added space. The idea was to fill up that added space in a way that wasn't repetitive and looked realistic. This worked pretty well but still needed more work to appear natural. So I applied a little Gaussian Blur to this area - much better, although if you look closely it still appears a bit repetitive).

2) Next I did my usual kinds of edits in PSE: using adjustment layers I tweaked brightness & contrast and color saturation here and there. And I fine-tuned the image with a slightly different crop. Here's that version...

   

3) Finally I tried a square crop and did the same sorts of PSE adjustments as in #2...

   

Wishing all of us a good week.

Good morning all.  I haven't been out with the camera in a while - it has been very hot here with several days topping 100F.I pulled these from the archives from our trip to Laredo, Texas last Feb.

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Anybody around?

I haven't taken any photos for several days; had some things come up that I needed to address.

But I did get out for an early walk today at the right time to see the strong early sunlight strike some untended succulents. I like the diagonal and I think the colors turned out beautiful.

   

I hope all is well with those in our small group.

Happy Wednesday/ Thursday all!

We are in a heat wave this week. 99 F actual temp, 106 F feel like heat index temp. 
Here are a couple of  shots of our little Main Street park. The lot was where one of the first Banks in Mitchell stood before fire got it in 1981.

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I took my usual 06:00 AM walk yesterday, interested in seeing how my neighborhood fared during the heavy rainfall and strong gusts of wind during the preceding afternoon and night.

What struck me immediately was that homeowners will be busy gathering up the large amount of pine needles on the yards, sidewalks, and streets...

   

   

As I expected, we didn't have flooding, although water 2 to 3 inches (about 5 to 7.5 cm) gathered in some of the lowest spots of the streets. I decided to find and shoot a scene with inverted reflections in a spot where water gathered. This one worked OK.

   

All things considered, my area survive the storm with little apparent damage. Unfortunately, other areas not too far north and south, NW, NE,east, south, SE and SW weren't as lucky. Substantial flooding (especially in hilly terrain and closer higher elevations) endured flash floods and mandatory evacuations.

Good day or evening.

Another from my front yard, taken 3 days ago...

   

What a grand World Cup it was.

Congratulations to Australia and New Zealand for planning and presenting this remarkable sportis spectacle. The most attended and most viewed women's sporting event ever! Well done.

I applaud the performances of the many teams that overachieved - Morocco, Nigeria, Colombia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Philippines, Jamaica, and South Africa come to mind (and my apologies for any I've missed).

And of course congratulations to Spain for their triumph.

No photo but wondering if Dave is in the path of Hurricane Hilary?