Daily Archives: September 10, 2012

Peek – a – boo : fall palette found at the zoo.

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Peek - a - boo : fall palette found at the zoo. on 365 Project

I saw this technique for making a color palette of your pictures on 365 today and had to try it out, using a picture I took of BB at the zoo this morning. It was admittedly not a very colorful picture but it was the cutest shot I got today with The Little Miss running to and forth and the light very much playing against me as we walked from lions to otters to prairie dogs.

The link above will tell you how to make a palette picture of your own using templates on Photoshop. I’m all stingy and cheap and using Linux and thus do not have Photoshop but I was able to make this myself in Gimp using layers and the little eye droplet tool. If I were better at using Gimp, I would have lined up my palettes better, but I think it still came out pretty good. I’ll try it again when I’ve taken a better picture (and by better I just mean more vibrant, interesting colors and better lighting – it’s a great shot of BB and way better than the pixelated washed out shots of black swans and giraffes I took).

All in all, I was pretty proud of myself for figuring out how to do this on my own, no templates or pricey image editing software required. Speaking of which (sort of) I just switched to a new OS called Mint and while I’m loving it, I cannot get Picasa to download, probably because Google completely dropped support for Picasa on Linux, but either way, I’m kind of bummed because I loved Picasa a lot both as an image editor and picture organizer and web album storage.

I know there are a lot of online photo editing options, but I was pretty happy doing it on my computer and liked being able to organize and edit all at once, rather than opening up each picture in Gimp. At the moment I’m trying out a Linux program called Shotwell which is pretty good but I’m not convinced it will be a permanent solution for me. Any Linux users out there have a better suggestion?

poem: apologies (to my children, on behalf of the world)

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A couple weeks ago I shared with you a poem I wrote, inspired by a writing prompt at Real Women Real Songs. This week their writing prompt was apologetic. After reading through their provided definitions and quotes I once again found myself inspired. What follows is a poem to my children, apologizing for the harsher realities of this world. It’s a work in progress, as ever, but possibly as good as it’s going to get.

Apologies

I’m sorry my dear
that the world is not
crystal clear for you.
That the path is long and winding
changing, restraining, containing
and never explaining.

I apologize
for this world of smoke and
mirrors, pretense and lies.
For people who say yes
but mean no, for answers
that always hide.

I know it is not easy
to navigate a world with no
clear direction, no one
destination with which to
aspire. I perspire at the
thought of you going it alone.

I’ll hold your hand if you
want me to, for as long as
you want me to…
I will walk this road with you.
But I know that one day
you will walk it alone.

We all walk alone one day.
We all feel this pain, I maintain…
We all wish this world would explain, my love.
We all want to complain to Eyes Above.
We all whisper in vain, my love.
We all make our own way.

Feel free to leave any thoughts in the comments section, but again please be kind or at least respectful. Per usual, this poem was written in a largely stream of consciousness  style – there were a few lines I mulled over, a few syllables added in, lines tidied up a bit, but as they say… What you see is assuredly what you get.