Texture Tuesday & a Perfect Summer Day

Long hot summer at the Jersey Shore.  I've been trapped in my bedroom by my window air conditioner for months because our central air died years ago.  The jeep I drive also has no air but living down the Jersey Shore makes it easy to escape the heat and soak up a little sea breezes in the evening.  The picture below is from an impromptu drive through Belmar and up over the ocean bridge connecting it and Avon-by-the-Sea .  

As I crossed the bridge I saw the beach and the inlet as the sun started slipping down in the west.  I couldn't resist!  I had DH pull over briefly on the other side of the bridge, grabbed my little point & shoot and started hiking back over the bridge snapping along the way.  The natives and tourists were out in force and these folks wanted to be on candid camera so I obliged!

This piece is for "Texture Tuesday".  An informal show and tell at Kim Klassen's Cafe.  The assignment was to use a photograph of "looking down"... I couldn't find a better photograph than this one of happy folks ending a day on the sea.

This was done using my photograph with Kim's Dream It texture.  The blending mode was Linear Light at 32% and the font Papyrus set at 79% opacity.  Life is everywhere you look whether it's up or down so Celebrate it!

ADOBE

At the end of August this year my trusty but old computer crashed. It took with it every photo I'd ever taken digitally plus every word I'd written since 1995. It basically took away my life because I use my camera and Adobe Photoshop to make my art. My son, who is now a certifiable genius, loaned me his notebook and took on the arduous and sometimes seemingly impossible task of resurrecting my old computer from the dead.

Things went along well for 3 months while he sporadically probed the depths of my computer. I continued to take photos and use photoshop daily. I started listing my photos on Etsy...a long time dream of mine. So imagine my surprise when two weeks ago I went to one of my picture sites to retrieve some photos and when clicking on what looked like my gallery link initiated a tsunami of malware and trojans onto his notebook.

It seems that the innocent looking Adobe Acrobat Reader that popped up and then closed on my screen was hiding some nasty stuff that followed my keystrokes and wouldn't let me out of its stranglehold unless I BOUGHT the software needed to erase the viruses it had downloaded to me. Cyber blackmail at its best. Needless to say that notebook crashed and along with it three months of photos, notes, emails, etc. I was back to where I'd started...unable to connect in cyberspace with anyone.

Long story short. This latest cyber attack on my computer put my son into hyperdrive and he worked one solid week to restore my old computer and protect it from every and all nasty and malicious software that tried to worm its way in. He succeeded so well that I have my restored computer working better, faster and safer than ever before. And I can once again blog, post and list to my heart's content.

The moral of this story is simple. TRUST NO ONE. Even if a friend sends you a letter and there is a link, jpg or doc file in it don't click on it unless you computer tells you it's been checked for incoming viruses. As far as clicking links on websites...that's a crap shoot, I guess. I thought that this picture site was safe but they had obviously been hacked by professionals. This has happened on Twitter and even Facebook so the best advice is to be sure your security software is up to date.

BTW...the link you will be taken to if you click the title of this post is BusinessWeek. There you can read the full story about Adobe and their Hacker battle.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my tweets and facebook friends!

LOVE is a Nikon camera

Have you ever had a day where everything seems to go wrong and then...just at the last minute...you discover MAGIC! That's what happened to me today. I've blogged before about my computer crash in late August when I lost all of my photo files. It seemed like a total disaster at the time and still makes me cry when I think about it for too long. Today I was supposed to get word if the image file drive could be saved. Alas when they tried to access it, it came up corrupted...again!!
So today I spent some time on flickr looking for inspiration and new ideas. I've been playing around with Photoshop and textures/overlays and on flickr I came across a young mother and photographer who works magic with her Nikon D700 and sells the most incredible textures to use with your photos. Shana Rae has a lovely website called Florabellacollection.com (click on the title of this blog and it will zip you over there).
Just spending time looking at her beautiful work has left me feeling hopeful that maybe I NEEDED to lose the old so there is room for the NEW. I'll always miss all of those thousands of photos I lost BUT I do believe there are some amazing photos waiting in my future!

Vintage Kodak Slides

I've spent a fruitless evening surfing through eBay looking for vintage slides to use in making my SX70 and TtV images. I lost all of my photographic images (10,000+ images) when my computer crashed in late August so I've decided to scan and use my father's old slides to alter in Photoshop. Sounds like a great idea but I've come to realize that I'll need a lot more than Daddy's photography if I plan to keep on working. I always thought he had a camera at his eye but I've not been able to find more than 75-100 slides. *sigh* I love my great ideas but hate it when I can't find a way to carry them out!

So here's an appeal to all my readers. If you have vintage slides you'd like to sell.. I'm interested. If you'd rather do a 'loner' thing I'd be happy to trade with some of my work. Just leave a comment and I'll track you down. Thanks for any vintage images you can dredge up for me. I'm devastated to lose so much of my work. A hard lesson learned, always back up your computer even if you think you've got top of the line virus protection!

The evolution of an Artist

I can't believe I'm actually blogging again. July 1st the darn computer black screened and refused to be awakened from the dead. Two weeks later I'm back with only minor loss of information. I knew I did a good thing when I sent my son off to college to learn all about electronic film, animation and COMPUTERS. He was able to save my 'soul' (my hard drive) but everything else was fried.

The Lord does work in amazing ways, however. Just that week I had been wondering if I'd made the right decision to go back to photography and hang up my brushes. Two weeks later I can honestly say I never picked up a brush to paint and didn't miss it for a moment but I longed for my Adobe Photoshop and the thousands of photos that were locked in my hard drive. Now I'm POSITIVE that I'm heading in the right direction at last. I thought it might be interesting to share some of the work I've done along the way and so my next posting will be glimpses of the 'art' I've produced during the last 30 years.