Quote Challenge revisited

After a good while, I decided I'd play along the quote challenge from Beyond Layers day 39 anyway. I had already had a look at some quotes, so I went back and did some digging for photos. Seeing the results, I'm happy I did.

First Tulips

A picture of the first tulips pushing up, taken on 2 May 2013. Thought the quote was pretty apt for the image. The prompt word was "life".

Resources:
- font KG Ways To Say Goodbye by Kimberly Geswein

Sleepers

The quote challenge word was "peace". This made me think of our latest little puppies when they were little puppies, in this picture less than a month old.

Resources:
- textures from Shadowhouse October Square Texture Set 2 by Jerry Jones
- font Learning Curve Pro by Blue Vinyl Fonts

Foxy - Indian Summer

On reading the prompt word "change" I knew immediately what my quote would be: Dorothy Parker's poem Indian Summer. Ever since I first read it I've loved the poem. And I roughly knew what I wanted to do with the images, too - originally I associate the poem with our second-ever Dandie, Veera, whom we called Madame, because she was very dignified, self-assured and definitely not one to fool with. She was a businesslike, no-nonsense personality, but charming. However, since she left us years before the age of digital cameras and even the scans I have of her are not of very high quality, the dog in the photos is our present Madame, called Foxy. Totally different, with a lot more sense of humour (yes, Dandies come equipped with that), but certainly a lady who knows what she wants, who turned nine this week. In the last picture, by the way, she is not growling but actually smiling.

Resources:
- template 018 by myself
- background papers from paper pack Green Finch and Linnet Bird by myself
- font Lavanderia by James T. Edmondson

By The Frozen River

The fourth prompt was "intentions" and for this, the Douglas Adams quote was my absolute favourite. It's so true for me in so many ways. The picture shows my home town since 1987, where I definitely didn't plan to move. When I first went to study, I somehow thought I'd end up in the south, Helsinki or thereabouts. And here I am, 600 kilometres north, and have been happy here for more than a quarter of a century. Oh my. I took the picture on a walk in the centre on 1 May this year. Yes, it was pretty cold.

Jackdaws

The last prompt was "focus". I like the quote, and the photo is one of a series I managed to take on 8 June of a gang of Jackdaws, who landed on the grass and  were a bit shy of me, obviously thinking the treat on the ground might belong to me. They circled around, trying to appear nonchalant and uninterested, until one of them started the approach. Unfortunately none of the photos I took of the actual attack turned out any good but well, that's life, right?

Type Tricks

Another Beyond Layers post. On day 56 at BL Kim offered us a couple of new tricks, how to type text on a path and how to create a rounded rectangular frame. With the latter technique I've been working for years already, so I just played with the type.

For this is used a photo taken at the barbershop singing course me and three of my vocal group friends attended at the beginning if June. It was taken by our new friend Reija during our extra, ladies-only evening rehearsal.

How We Sang

- texture Musiclovin by Kim Klassen
- texture Savor by Kim Klassen
- font Tipbrush Script by Måns Grebäck
- font KG This Is Not Goodbye by Kimberly Geswein

This afternoon, in fact, we had a first meeting of our new barbershop quartet, consisting of the oldest singers in our vocal ensemble. New, because we have never actually sung four-part harmony just the four of us together, and I have certainly not been singing the tenor part. We cleared half the piece we were rehearsing, dwelled on some of the chords over and over again just because they sounded sooo sweet, and concluded happily that we most definitely have learned something in the dozen or so years we have been singing together. Which is nice to notice.

Instagram-ish

At BL day 54 was declared Instagram day. This old fart had to dig up what that meant. Instagram seems to be this online photo-sharing thingy where you upload your phone pictures and apply some filters on them. Oh and all the pictures are square. I tried it out, but couldn't for the life of me figure out how to use it on the browser. Obviously it's meant to be used only by phone, so I decided it wasn't for me. Anyway, for the challenge we were to try out some instagram-ish photoshop actions on our photos, and there was a scavenger hunt as well. As you might expect, I did the hunt in my archives again, but restricted myself to using photos from last summer only.

Also, when I started playing with the actions Kim suggested we use I was not awfully impressed by the way they were made - they didn't open a new document, as many, or create the action as editable layers, as many others I've used, so I had to use the history tool to go back to the original if I wanted to try out the action. Sure gave me good practice in using the history tool! In the end I decided I wouldn't be using only the given actions but some others, too.

There were five themes for the scavenger hunt: something pretty, something blue, something borrowed, water and dreamy. For the pretty one I chose a picture I took on my birthday as we were driving back home from Helsinki. We stopped at this new lay-by service place, and they had this little thing we call maitolaituri in Finnish. Literally you could translate it as "milk jetty" - it was a place where the farmers would leave their milk churns by the roadside where they could be collected by the dairy deliverers. There are none in that use anymore, but I thought this thing, although new and non-authentic, was pretty and nostalgic and definitely worth a photo.

Something Pretty

Resources:
- Instagram filter action by Daniel Box
- framing action by Paint The Moon

My "something blue" photo is a photo taken by the river on a walk with the dogs.

Something Blue

Resources:

- Instagram filter action by Daniel Box 

- framing action by Paint The Moon

For "something borrowed" I chose a photo of our dandie Justiina, whom our friend Nunnu borrowed to cuddle with. I photographed them after the ring at the Terrier Specialty show, basking on the grass in the sunshine.

Something Borrowed

Resources:

- Instagram filter action by Daniel Box 

- framing action by Paint The Moon

The next prompt was "water". I had two I liked and couldn't decide which picture to choose, they were so different but they go well together. They also reflect well the difference between the dandies in them, the two sisters Justiina and Marleena. Justiina is approaching the water carefully and suspiciously and barely wets her nose there, whereas Marleena happily wades in the water, enjoying the refreshing coolness on a warm day. What the picture doesn't show, however, is her constant rushing in and out of the water. She has recently discovered that one can actually play in the water, but her sister still thinks water is only good for drinking.
 

Tasting the Water

Resources:

- Instagram filter action by Daniel Box 

- framing action by Paint The Moon

Wading in Water

Resources:- CoffeeShop Vintagram action by Rita @ The Coffee Shop Blog

- framing action by Paint The Moon

The last prompt was "dreamy". Here I ended up choosing two images taken in Lappajärvi during our DDT Club Show and summer camp at the beginning of August. The first photo is of a folly right on the lake shore, the other one is a shot to the lake - originally I tried to shoot the gull sitting on the navigation mark, but it turned into a shot of the type "there-is-a-gull-there-just-try-and-spot-it".

Folly on the Lake

Resources:
- action Watermelon Blues by Sarah Lynn Cornish

- framing action by Paint The Moon

Lakeshore Rushes

Resources:
- action Pretty Hazy by Sarah Lynn Cornish

- Instagram filter action by Daniel Box 

- framing action by Paint The Moon

Lots of dogs and water in these pictures. Yes, we had a nice summer.

More fences

The challenge of day 53 at BL was to watch a video lesson and try it on an image by Kim. I didn't see much point in simply copying what she had done, so I went straight to the second part, testing the recipe and techniques on an image of my own. It wasn't actually a spoken part of the challenge, but the underlying idea seemed to be fences, so I decided to try the techniques on a fence image.

First I found a fence picture related to my previous post about our re-fenced yard last autumn. It's a photo of the fence on the northern side of our yard after some snowfall last December. Tried Kim's techniques here, but not the recipe, since warming up a snowy picture didn't feel like a good idea.

Snowy Fence

Resources:
- framing action Simple by Chain

So I had to dig into the archives again, but after a while I found exactly what I needed: a photo of a fence around a church in Lübeck, photographed in May 2012. The dark fence against the red brick of the church was well suited for the warming and reddening Kim did in her recipe, so I used Kim's recipe almost as such, with minor adjustments, and followed the techniques as well.

Fence in Lübeck

Resources:
- texture Pumpkin Grunge by Kim Klassen

- framing action Simple by Chain

And on to posting the next challenge. I'm determined to get all this stuff posted so I can start working on something new.

Finding Fences

Day 52 challenge at BL was to go and find some fences. The idea was to find some interesting (somehow I think they were meant to be pretty?) fences and photograph them. Well, this made me dig into my archives for something not so much pretty but what actually was precisely what we did last autumn. We went looking for fences.

At the end of October, tired of the little girls always finding their way on the fields and disappearing there to hunt for heaven knows what, we finally decided it had to stop. We had fenced a sizable part of our property back when we moved here in the 1990s, but back then, we had
a) a large dog
b) many dandies
c) unrealistic ideas about the need for space
d) illusions of how much time we'd be able to dedicate to taking care of our yard.

Over the years, we kept repairing the fence here and there, but had already come to realise that we had fenced much more than was either necessary or practical. Parts of the fence stood in the middle of untouched old fields, pushing up fireweed and willow, parts were rotting in the wet ground by the brookside. So we went to the bushes to find the old fence and dig it up and move it so that it could be planted closer to our actual garden.

Not so easily done, the two of us toiled away with it for a good while, but   after a couple of weeks, just before the the ground frost set in, we finished the project. The fence had to be revisited and the posts banged in again in the spring, and we'll have to do the same every spring after the ground frost melts, but there's significantly less fence to take care of now.

Resources used:
- template 27 by myself
- paper Cloudbusting 05 by myself
- font SF Arch Rival by ShyFonts
- font Janda Elegant Handwriting by Kimberly Geswein
- font KG Call Me Maybe by Kimberly Geswein

Remembering

Got to day 51 at BL. Wow, I'm almost half-way through a course that actually finished five months ago. Go me.

This time the challenge was to use two of Kim's textures, Thursday and Yesteryear, and follow the recipe she gave on any image.

As the day I processed these photos marked the fourth anniversary of my father's death, I chose something that made me think of him as my first image. I took the photo when I was staying at father's flat after his death, helping my sister to clear it up. The flat never was a home to me, and only a few years to my father, but the objects there are soo familiar. I remember what meticulous care father took of the little flat, dusting and hoovering and tidying up and watering plants and washing each cup straight after use, and I remember teaching him to use the washing machine after mother died two years previously. There is the sofa and armchairs that used to belong to my grandmother and that father had reupholstered for her sometime in the seventies. There's the painting of the waterfall in our town - like all paintings in my parents' house, it was painted by an acquaintance. The painter was the boyfriend of our that time lodger, and I used to sit in their room and watch him paint and we'd talk about art. Father was very fond of the painting, me much less, but it was an essential part of the living room even in the old house. Here I followed Kim's recipe rather closely.

My Father's Living Room

Resources:
- textures Thursday & Yesteryear by Kim Klassen
- photo frame by Rita @ The Coffee Shop Blog
- background paper Close to Ground 05 by myself

The second photo I tried the recipe on was chosen for similar reasons. It is a shot from my parents' summer cottage window, our second home in my childhood. It belongs to my sister now, and I was visiting the cottage quite probably for the last time in 2010. The July evening was like countless others I've spent there, except for the fact that I've never before been there all alone, not even waiting for anybody to arrive. The view is not what I would have seen as a child - the trees have grown, others have been cut down, the garden swing is a newer one. But the sauna and setting sun and lake are the same, as is the old bathtub grandmother started using as a flowerbed and the whole feel of the place.

Remembering Childhood Summers

Resources:
- textures Thursday & Yesteryear by Kim Klassen
- framing action Simple px by Chain

I decided to try the recipe on a third photo as well. This is a recent one, I took it at the end of August when we were on our usual walk route with the dogs. I mainly wanted to see what the recipe would do to the blue sky of the original. Not bad. The feel is very much the same as in the previous image, although the originals differ quite a lot.

Path to River

Resources:
- textures Thursday & Yesteryear by Kim Klassen
- framing action Simple px by Chain

A Tall Order

For day 50 at Beyond Layers we were asked to show where we live, and shoot landscapes in portrait format. I often do that, and originally I thought I'd pick something from the archives again.

But I didn't. For this challenge I actually didn't delve into my archives but instead took some time to go for a little walk to get some images of where I live. Not of the garden, not the doggies, but some shots on the riverside in the town centre.

As the opportunity more or less offered itself, I took it, and feel so good about it. About a month ago, I went to buy meat for the dogs from the truck the stops here every four weeks, and it was such a beautiful August evening. So instead of rushing home with the boxes of frozen meat in the boot of my car I took a few steps towards the river and took the first photos.

Riverside from Market Place

Process:
- ran action CoffeeShop 2020 by Rita @ The Coffee Shop Blog
- lowered layer opacity to 80% and masked out from the bottom
- applied texture Havana by Kim Klassen
- inverted texture colour and changed blend mode to 60% Color Dodge
- ran framing action Shadow by Chain

Then I grew even bolder - I drove a bit further along the riverside, parked the car for about ten minutes and walked to a park to take some photos towards the centre. I "wasted" perhaps a full fifteen minutes there, but it felt like a huge achievement. Which in a way it was, because I had taken a step out of my oh so well set ways.

Riverside Sunset

Process:
- straightened image in ACR
- corrected white balance in ACR
- ran action Fresh & Colourful by The Pioneer Woman
- ran framing action Shadow by Chain