Plant Tip

Tip: Buy plants that love sunlight if you live in an area of the world where it rains or is grey 6 months out of the year. Then you can be just as good with the plant-keeping-alive-skills as I am!

Special Friday Edition

Laura at Dolce Pics put up another What's Your Play and I wanted to play along again. I might have to go into the archives if I can't find anything nice for next week.

Original:


With my adjustments:


All post work done in Lightroom. Auto tone, auto white balance, bumped blacks, and played with the highlights. Slight crop to get the shelf out of the shot and put the blue knob in the third/third corner. The reason for the highlight adjustment was to get the shadow to pop a little more in the left third.

The Useful Things

I must confess, never in my life have I had a vegetable garden. Or an herb garden. Or really my very own garden at all. I'm a plant freak though, and I tend to buy a ridiculously large number of houseplants just to cover up the small percentage of them that I happen to kill. And by small percentage I mean, until I moved to Vancouver, I'd really only killed one - an orchid. A feisty little bastard that never even gave me a chance to keep it alive. Since moving back to North America, I can confirm there have been deaths of a pink spotted little guy, a teeny tiny fern that I swear was nearly dead when I got him anyways, a mini rose plant that no one could have kept from dying, 6 dahlia bulbs that produced 6 plants and about as many flowers, and a spangly little leafy bugger that didn't even look pretty when I brought him home. And all of that in less than three years. So I thought it was best then to plant myself some vegetables and herbs.

Behold, the soon to be dead plants that adorn my balcony - for the moment.

The Flowers, Let me See Them

I needed a little something to brighten up my weekend, so I bought myself flowers, and planted my own garden.



And my little fuzzball had to see what all the fuss was about.

Lavender Thumb

I went a little plant crazy a while back and decided I needed to try growing lavender plants from seeds. My first attempt yielded no green sprouts, or leaves, let alone lavender plants. Behold, my second attempt, which started on Saturday afternoon, and has yet to prove entirely useless. There's time for that in about a week and a half, though.

Plants like sunlight, right?

Taking an Afternoon Nap

Last weekend after spending a while planting some new flowers and vegetables in my balcony garden, I decided it was a good time to take a nice afternoon nap. My cat, not one to disagree with a nap, took up residence in the comfy chair for a little snooze. And isn't she just adorable?

Special Sunday Edition

Laura over at Dolce Pics does a weekly what would you do to this photo post. And this week's shot intrigued me for some reason. So I decided while watching the Red Wings game that I'd mess around with the shot and see if I ended up liking my version. Shockingly, I did.

First, let's look at the original.



And now my version.



All edits were done in Lightroom. Angled and cropped original. Upped Blacks and Clarity/Virbance/Saturation. Put in a slight pink tint, adjusted temp towards more blue hues.

Approach

On the tour of English Gardens, we travelled through a sleepy little hamlet in the cotswolds. This is from our approach.

Water feature

Doesn't everyone have a creek running through their English garden?

At the end of the house

While scoping out gardens in nearby towns, I happened to fall in love with this door. It looked like it could have been the garage door, but I could not for the life of me figure out just how it would open.

Again with the gardens

Since the weather wasn't cooperating yesterday when I wanted to go shoot the flowers on my balcony, I have to resort to the English gardens from 6 months ago.

Monday snuck up on me

As it's a three day weekend here in Canada, the first day of the week snuck up on me and I nearly forgot entirely to post a picture. I spent the majority of yesterday planting and replanting a bunch of things in planters for my balcony and I was reminded of the English gardens I wandered around back at Christmastime.

Speaking of Black Tie Events

Because I know you come here for wedding updates on a weekly basis...

I'm working on invitations right now. Well, not right now, but this week. It's this week's project. Addressing invitations, putting them all together into an envelope, putting stamps on the envelopes. It could all go so much quicker if I wasn't still waiting for the words to put on the envelopes.

Finder's Keepers

Rooting around in the muck and the mud

What the cold can do

"I'm a scarily effective hunter, I'm fast as lightning, I'm awesome and have massive paws that take down prey."



"I'm goddamn tired, and it's fecking cold here. Someone turn on the damn heater."

Flashy

Despite being chastised for the very idea of it, I thought it would cheer me up so much if this guy had fanned out his feathers. It's possible that had I only needed a few more minutes of making weird noises at him before he would have done me the favor of proving my theory that persistence and nagging works. Alas, as it was below freezing, I couldn't bear to stop walking or moving long enough to let my nagging skills really show. And apparently the chattering teeth was putting him off.

Front


Back

Nosy Lil Buggers

I can imagine that most people that have been to the Cotswolds may suggest antiquing or admiring the beautiful architecture. After having visited the area a few times on previous trips to England, I thought I'd go ahead and try something different. So I spent perhaps the coldest day of my trip (-2, Thankyouverymuch!) wandering around the wildlife park. A small sampling of the animals I thankfully did not have to coerce out of their cozy homes follows for the rest of the week.

Sticky Situation

I may have mentioned that I'm getting married, and it dawned on me this week that I'm actually getting married within three months. That's pretty close, here, so I thought maybe I should spend some time finalizing some details and finishing up all the planning I've been sporadically doing for the past 9 months. And I've come to the conclusion that I am SO BORED with making decisions, so I'm just going to stop trying so damn hard to make everything so damn cool. What it all comes down to is that people I want to be there on our wedding day will be there and I can spend time with a lot of people that I love spending time with. So, I don't care if they have pretty pretty flowers on their tables, or Oh my god, more layers of fabric on the tables, chairs or FREAKING FLOORS. All these details are making me prickly.

f/5.6, 1/50s, ISO 200, 105mm

Not Football

I was actually interested in what was going on in the game. I learned the rules and the terms and the scoring system and everything.

Preparations
f/5.6, 1/6s, ISO 100, 58mm

And then the sky went all colorful and distracting. It wasn't my fault.

Lights in the Sky
f/5.6, 1/30s, ISO 100, 24mm

Landline

The morning after a wedding in the hilly, and gorgeous area of Derbyshire in England, I caught a little bit of nice light on the morning fog. Although the horizon looks somewhat straight, let's keep in mind that it was the morning after a wedding, and I was standing on one leg. True story.

Landline
f/9, 1/125s, ISO 100, 67mm

Seasonal

It's as if there are different seasons in Vancouver recently. The reason I can tell that there are flowers blooming without looking at them is that I sneeze approximately 17 times every hour. Although it's somewhat amusing, if I'm in public when a fit starts, people now look at me and go, "ZOMG SWINE FLU!" and I can't argue with them, what with all the AHHHHH-CHOOOOO'ing I'm doing.

Pollen
f/4.0, 1/80s, ISO 100, 105mm

Series: Lost in Translation

I'm an inbox organizer. I don't tend to let emails pile up without being sorted into folders or getting followup flags. I have an inability to let my spam folder grow to a size above 100 without emptying it. It's a sickness. In one of my more stellar moments, I started compiling a list of amusing Spam subjects. Don't judge me. To start my series of Lost in Translation, a collection of actual Spam subject lines, witness:

You can be a real macho anytime and anywhere.
f/4.0, 1/125s, ISO 100, 105mm

Lesson 5: Blend in like a local

This week we're going to look at ways you can come off as a tourist in London.

Lesson 5: Awkwardly "Mind the Gap" by falling into your fellow passengers.

f/5.6, 1/2s, ISO 200, 24mm