A good day for attempts and failures...

First off, we are pretty cold right now. I mean the weather is always a great subject right? I can't recall any conversation lately that didn't start without the comment, "How 'bout this weather?"

Last Friday it was 42 F  and by Monday...the air temperature is -8 here and the wind chill is -25 F. Why not? It is weather after all. Tonight, we will get to -12 or so. Well, there we go. I've seen -20 F a few times, so I know what to expect. 

I am SO grateful that when we remodeled, we were able to reinsulate and upgrade the windows and heat.

There was a time in our little cottage when our doors were covered with frost on the inside and the windows all had plastic over them. Our hydrant outside that we had for watering our stock froze up. Running a hose from the bathroom wasn't an option. But I did carry lots of water that time.

The weather service has put out an 'Upcoming Extreme Cold Warning'. 

Today is Martin Luther King's Birthday and it is a Federal Holiday. I'm going to celebrate it and not the other thing. I may even watch the Puppy and Kittens! Being featured during that thing.

Or I may just shut everything down and work on something creative to keep my mind occupied since I can't go for a hike.

Yesterday I had the bright idea of building trees out of pipe cleaners for a spooky scene with my minifigures or something else. Being quiet in a small cottage requires me to do quiet things. I built some cool 'trees' and utterly failed at doing a good job of photographing a 'scene'.

Below is just after I 'failed' at getting what I wanted...

Failed again! It looks like she is getting attacked by octopi??

Some toy photographers draw out a scene and plan and plan...on how they are going to execute it. I don't. 

I wing it. Seriously.
I never quite know what I am doing until I arrive at something that makes me happy.

I fail a lot with the light with the scene, and with the ideas.

Then I tried this version and it looked awesome in the camera...

The processing afterwards was horrible. Dark, awful, full of all sorts of artifacts. 

So last night I thought I'd just delete it all and start again.

However...

This morning I decided to try something different. I dropped the file into ON1 and hit the button that I never use. The program then 'reads' the photo and adjusts it. Most of the time the AI adjustment sucks.

Then I scratched my head and added something called LUTS.

And I liked it.

The final:

Now this was what I was going for and by golly I'm going to keep it. Even the goofy Tree Monster turned out okay. Maybe it still looks like the minifig is getting attacked by an Octopus, but if one uses their imagination and it looks a little scary, I did my job.

In other news. 

I'm not going to get into the politics of things. But I will be following the news with the sound off so I can read it. During today's events I will be mostly offline and creating things indoors.

The mules are doing fine since they can get out of the breezes. Yesterday they took naps in an area close to the house. They looked like sleeping dragons.

They have heated water and plenty of hay and very fluffy insulating winter coats.

Little Richard is doing well also. He napped next to the shed yesterday the sun reflects its heat off the wooden siding and he was protected from the wind. 

It looks like another quiet day spent mostly indoors thinking of creative things to do.

Stay warm.

Rainy day fun with Still Life

 

Teddy Bear Garden Club
Meeting

With two days of darkness and dreariness filled with rain and well, gloom...I decided to mess around with --- toys of all things! Surprise!

I had to be quiet because the other half was Mr. Sleepy Head. I did chores of course along with transplanting Bee Balm plants that were emerging. They are so hardy and tough. I knew with the rain, it might be a good time to move things [in between showers].

I decided to clean up my old camera and hired a crew to do that while I swept the house for Charlie hair.

Kidding of course. I decided to take advantage of the low light coming in from the east and south windows. It wasn't harsh, but perfect for Still Life.

You don't need much room to 'make' a scene.

Clean up Crew

What it looked like before I put up a tea towel...

"Oh no Chuck, we need some eye drops! Can

you get the top off?"

These are HO Scale pieces and they don't like to stand up on their own very well. Viola! Some Elmer's Glue works very well. This wipes off easily and works wonders! It goes on purple and fades to clear.

It is amazing what happens to a creative person when she gets bored from being quiet around the house. 

I got out the kid blocks and a little light and set them up on my 'play' table.  For special effects I put the camera on a timer and simply used a face mister for fog and water in a spray bottle for rain.

With almost no edits, I got these photos of this little Lego figure:

Pre-edit. 

Upped the blacks and....decreased

the color...

I even tried making Frank the Trooper float, and that failed miserably. I used a fishing line to suspend him and tried the following. He kept swinging around and nothing worked out for me.

I went back to what worked before and added a filter to the light.

Original:

Final:

I added some contrast and a used brush that comes with ON1. It is supposed to be a comet, but I thought it looked like a blast from a blast. The 'rain' is from the spritzer.

Friday morning we had sunlight! It was cold and windy...but Charlie and I adventured down into the valley to the Big Spring.

More about that...

later.

Today it is snowing again.

thhhhppptttptptp...ffffttt.