Friday, August 13, 2010

simply beautiful

I admit, I have a love affair with my camera. It goes with me  almost everywhere, which is usually no where, but  it is always stuffed in a pocket  so that when something strikes my fancy I can capture it in a photograph.

Taking photos has  been a hobby of mine for as long as I can remember. I remember as a little bit  taking my mother's  camera   and taking pictures of everything that I could and using up all her film. Boy she hated getting a roll of film back  from processing that was nothing but things I deemed picture worthy at 4 or 5. My first camera was a Kodak  polaroid and while it was fun in 1975(boy I am dating myself ) to have  developed film in an instant, I much prefer the camera of today. I absolutely love the fact that I can take  and screw up as many pictures  as my lil heart desires and it does not cost  a buck a pop to do so.

I, to this day,use  a cheap camera and  still have no idea how to edit them . I  know how to lighten or darken them and  I know how to put a spotlight around them. That is the extent of my photo editing abilities.  Some days, I think that I would like to  learn how to edit and skew pictures into  works of art  and beauty, but then I think that true beauty is created  and not built, bought or edited in. Altering them in ways that we are capable of today, in my eyes, would take away from that beauty.

One of my favorite photography subjects is  the sky and I am lucky enough to have a beautiful place  that is always offering up beautiful  moments   to capture in pictures.  Here are a few  of my favorite subject that have all been taken over  the last two weeks. All have been taken right out my front door and the only alterations are adjusting the light in in some of them to bring out  the highlights of them. While I  can't speak for anyone other than myself, I think  they are  simply beautiful.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

around the homestead-braiding onions-sorta, kinda

No I have not disappeared, just been  busy, and  had a computer meltdown last week. Once I got that replaced on  Saturday I had  to play catch up with school work  and deal with all the hassle of setting up a new computer. Now I just need to get my pictures off the old computer so that I can do a garden update. I could just take more pictures now, but  things are starting to really  get sorry looking after over a month of next to no rain.

Anywho...

Wow, I had no clue how difficult it was  to braid  onions until today and after the  mess I made , I doubt I will ever attempt to braid them again!  I have never actually seen anyone braid them in person and was going by a couple of tutorials that I had run across online , needless to say I did not do a very good job of it and  after a while just started tying them on. I think I would have done a better job had I had a human here to show me the basics of it.

I think I will just put the  rest of them  in some spare mesh bags that I have around. It made my hands hurts and  the semi dry stalks tore my cuticles all up. Me complaining about something tearing my hands up is  BAD, as I have some of the ugliest fingers  I have ever seen a female have. They also make a really BIG mess while you  are braiding them up. Anyone that has a real house  would be better off doing them outside if you try this. I did it on the floor  inside  and this is the mess I had when i was done .

The tutorials I used  to guide me in my epic failure  are  here  and here.