What came first?

The Chipmonk or the Egg?

Photoshopping Sand Hill Cranes

Down the road from where I live there are lots of corn fields and lots of Sand Hill Cranes. Clayton even sometimes calls me on his way to work to tell me where they are and how close to the road they are and how pretty their heads look. But I've never said, 'Really I better get my camera and drive over there and take some pictures" But this morning, on my way back from taking more pictures of baby cows (you can watch a slide show if you'd like here) I saw them in the field. I had already driven past and thought to myself, why not, go back and see if you can take a picture before they walk too much further away from the road. While I didn't have my 300 MM zoom lens with me, I was stuck with my 135MM and was not too happy with the results of my capture. So I decided to make my own image. I used three different pictures and cloned the edges together, I used the eye ball of the middle one, and copied it to the bird on the left and I enhanced the birds eye on the right as well. SO the moral of the story is...if you can't take the picture you wanted to take, then make one yourself in photoshop :-)

The image above is the one I created...

The image below is one of the three images I used to create it...

Currant Jelly - our first attempt at making jelly

I've never made jams or jelly's before and either has Clayton. Well Yesterday we did (well He did most of it) You should have seen him pick these berries. Our neighbors were nice enough to tell us we could stop by and pick all we wanted of their Red Currant berries. They don't like them and would have just gone to the birds...so we thought why not! Well we each had our buckets and I swear he picked two or three times as much as me and he didn't want to stop either. He said "When I was growing up and picking berries on my Grandma's farm, I was told never to come back without a full bucket of berries" and well I think that's stuck in his head.

So we got enough for one batch of jelly and had some extra which we saved for juice. Clayton had just bought this really neat apparatus which seeds and juices and dices and or chucks all sorts of stuff, I think it even does pasta sauce...and he was dying to use it. And this is how we used it....

Here are the berries we picked...

and here is Clayon having fun with his new apparatus (juicer, de-seeder etc.)

and see how it juices so easily

and spits out all the stems, seeds and leaves....

Here is the bowl of juice it made (this is not all of it there was more)

and this is the juice being cooked...just starting to boil...


and here are the first set of jars, it made more than it said...
hummmmm like 4 extra jars....

the recipe we followed said it would only make nine jars...well it made 12 (would have made 13 or 14) but we only bought twelve jars....

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makes me worry...just a little....that we did something wrong...and it wont set correctly.

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I'm really hoping not, because when we tasted this; OMG it was so good...

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We have already decided that if it does not set properly we are using it as syrup for our mickey mouse waffles we have them all the time. Yes Clayton's first waffle maker is shaped as mickey mouses head...cute huh?

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the american redstart .... another new bird

Ok, while this bird has been around here for some time, this is the first time I actually had my camera out and took a few pictures of it. Looking up on the Internet, I'd concluded that this bird is the American Redstart; "A boldly patterned warbler of second growth woods, the American Redstart frequently flashes its orange and black wings and tail to flush insect prey from foliage" which is what he did this afternoon while I was out and ready with camera in hand.

It's a Bugs Life

Ok, this picture really makes me want to get a macro lens! I literally could not see this bug till I zoomed into the picture I took. He's kinda cute dont'cha think? Just imagine how much more detail there would be if I had a really good Macro lens!

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Flowers in the yard...and First Berry Pick

This evening I took a walk in the yard and found a couple nice flowers and picked some berries; I ate them along the way, but this is what I brought home for dessert tonight. Maybe over some ice-cream........maybe.......they are pretty good by themselves.
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The image above has been altered in photoshop. I used an overlay of another image for texture then turned the opacity way down so you could almost see through it, but then played with the hue and saturation till I liked it. I probably couldn't repeat it if I tried as I didn't save the PSD file...silly me! but the fun of playing in Photoshop is just that...playing till you see something you like.

The image below is the original, however it's cropped from the original full capture.

Hasta's will be blooming soon

I've never had a Hasta before, never even heard of one, but here at the new house, I've got hundreds of them. It seems. Hundreds of stems with lots of budding flowers at least. Really though I might have close to 100 plants and they are all the same type. I've learned since coming here that there are a wide variety of Hasta all different colored foliage and I'd image different flowers too.

So they have all popped up stems and they all have budding blooms just waiting to open. This is a picture of one that is the furthest along. I'm wondering if my humming birds will come to these, as they look like they will be a flower they'd like.

I did a texture overlay on this image and tweaked the coloring and opacity a bit of the textured image (not the flower itself) and thought it turned out not too bad. Stay tuned for more as soon as they are opened fully I will take more.

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