Last Sunday I left home for a technical conference in Arizona, arriving home late Wednesday evening. I enjoyed a few short days at home and then tomorrow I fly down to San Diego to work for the week. All of this travel is fun but not very conducive to writing, so I haven’t been here on the blog much.
Today I’m dropping in for a quick note to say hi and let you know what’s up in my world…
I finally caved and took my own shoe selfie on the Portland Airport’s old carpet, which is rapidly vanishing as they replace it with new carpet. If you didn’t know you this was a “thing,” then check out #pdxcarpet on Instagram. Who knew carpet could reach cult status? Of course, I had to include the pink suitcase, which goes wherever I go. Off to San Diego!!
When I’m home, I’m still getting out hiking and enjoying the forest. This year, I’ve become enamored of playing with long exposures using the Slow Shutter Cam app. I enjoy the experimental nature of slow shutter work. You play and play and once in a while something wonderful results! I love the feelings the light and lines in the forest evoke, and seek to enhance the feeling in the post-processing. I’m now working on a series of these images. They’ve given a focus to my hiking photographs, and I’m starting to explore how best to present them. Stay tuned.
My son completed middle school! My in-laws were in town the last week to attend my son’s last choir concert of the year and to be here for his 8th grade celebration. It’s always fun to have them here! Brandon is getting very teenager-looking, isn’t he? He’s very excited for high school in the fall.
Anytime my mother-in-law comes to visit, we have a decorating project to do. I can arrange things artistically once I see them in a room, but she has a knack for finding the individual elements to pull a room together. This time the project was our hallway bathroom, which has been largely undecorated for the 17 years we’ve had this house. Now it’s a cozy place, thanks to her help!
The project also involved visiting my photographic archives to find and edit a couple of images for the frames on the wall. The sandy brown color in the room reminded me of the stone in Croatia, so I chose these two photographs, from Split and Korkula respectively. I thought you might enjoy seeing them, too. If you like the processing on these I’ve created a Lightroom preset called “Croatian Stone,” which you can download here. (Word of warning: I’m still using Lightroom 4 so hopefully it will work in newer versions.)
And with that, I’m off again! I hope to share something with you from the beach in California later this week, but given my success in blogging from the road in the past, I’m not promising anything. Have a great week!
Enjoy! Gotta play with that slow shutter cam…that looks like fun!
It is lots of fun! Although it also creates a lot of mess – you really have to experiment to get something good.
Busy life! Beach photos are my favorite. I hope you post a couple. Such a photogenic city to visit. I’m sure you will be busy. Oh, and don’t forget to work. Safe travels.
Haha! Forget to work… Don’t you mean don’t forget to have fun??
I used to live in San Diego. It’s a beautiful place with much to photograph, so I hope you have a chance to explore while you’re there. Thanks for the LR preset! I tried it in Lightroom 5 and it works just fine.
Yay! Thanks for letting me know it works great in LR5. Have you just lived EVERYWHERE?? 🙂