Project 365: A little bit of fun

Usually, I do most of my processing in Lightroom (love Lightroom madly and deeply!) but this week I’ve spent a good deal of time in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. I’ve learned a lot of fun and simple new tricks, and learned how to improve a couple of old ones.

One of the things I worked on was developing a new watermark for my pictures. I went through a watermarking phase a couple of years ago, but found them more trouble than they were worth. Nobody seemed terribly interested in stealing my pictures, and it seemed a pain to keep both watermarked and non-watermarked digital prints on file as well as keeping the original digital negative. Plus, I’m always concerned that a watermark might interfere with the image somehow, make a distraction of itself. But, in the end, I decided that I’d give watermarks another go.

That left me with the problem of designing a watermark. I’ve also been toying with the idea of hiring someone to design a logo for me, or at least coercing my graphic-design-trained husband into doing it for me. But I got to playing one afternoon during nap time on the long weekend, and came up with this:

I’m particularly fond of the little shooting star! So I’ve been using it this week as a watermark on my images, and eventually I’ll turn it into a banner for my portfolio site. One of these days.

Here’s something else fun I learned how to do this week! I found these frames on the Coffee Shop Blog, and thought they’d give a little pizazz to this picture of apple blossoms.

150:365 Blossoms

I was in the mood for something silly when I started playing with these vintage Fisher-Price toys we picked up at a flea market a couple of weeks ago. It was only when I started thinking about making a picture that I realized the mini-bus contains a family of five that could be ours if one of the boys would only grow his hair a little bit longer. 😉 I call it “Road trip!”

155:365 Road trip!!!!

I told you the long and convoluted story of cutting the grass on the long weekend, but I never did get around to telling you about my epic battle with the lilies of the valley. I spent Monday pulling more than 500 of the invasive suckers out of the front garden. The first foot and a half, I dug down and pulled out the root system, too, but I lost enthusiasm with another 20+ feet to go and started just yanking and tossing. This bouquet was really only an afterthought, created from fishing through the bin of discarded plants. Hey, good enough for Kate Middleton is good enough for me — they do smell pretty good, and I’ve still got another (sigh) 600 or so still left in the garden!

154:365 Evils of the valley

This picture was one of those moments when I came around a corner, saw how the light was illuminating his ridiculous hair, and instinctively reached for the camera. One shot, real quick before he moved, and this was it for the day!

153:365 Lucas in the morning light

This is another found photo. Ya gotta catch ’em being cute! I love the body language, and the fact that the two of them together are occupying one butt’s worth of space. The ISO was set really high because they were fidgeting and I was getting a lot of motion blur, and I was kind of surprised how much noise there was — but the pose is plenty cute enough to overcome that, I think!

152:365 Whatcha doin' big brother?

This one was all about the light. We desperately needed a new dining room table — we can barely fit the family around the ancient Ikea table we’ve had for 10+ years – and I’ve been coveting one since we moved. We found a place that makes harvest tables out of reclaimed wood, and I’ve been biding my time until we could afford one. It’s a little darker than I was expecting, but I love the character of it. Lucas thinks we got the bigger table just so he would have more room to colour.

151:365 Colouring

Lovely, no? And I have one more picture from this week, but it’s got enough of a story to it that I’m going to save it for it’s own blog post! Stay tuned!!

In the meanwhile, I’d love to hear your thoughts on watermarking in general and how I’ve applied the watermark to these pictures.

Author: DaniGirl

Canadian. storyteller, photographer, mom to 3. Professional dilettante.

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