…for the love of Snoopy. 💗
For everyone who needs an extra hug today:
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Hugs from us too!
M&M
Hi Folks:
Well, it’s now been 11 (!!) years since our blog took its first breath, and we currently have 635 blog posts and 150 pages on our site. The posts cover poetry, photography, our hugging adventures (88 countries and counting!) and various other musings; our pages include some of our stories and free Adventures of Rainbow Mouse colouring pages to download and enjoy. We’ve shared some wonderful adventures with you through these and are looking forward to sharing more in the future! This blog is our gift to you, our readers, and we very much appreciate having you here with us. Feel free to drop by any time, check out Marcia’s books, download our colouring pages, read our stories, leave a comment or reach out, relax and enjoy yourself. We don’t have any birthday cake that we can share, but we send you love.
Remember to hug someone you love today, even if it’s just screen to screen. You’ll both feel better for it! 🙅♀️🙅♂️
M&M
P.S. Extra special thanks to our son Nick, who does all of the techie stuff that keeps us afloat!! 🙂
Hi Folks:
This is the eleventh year now that we’ve made our photo calendar templates available, both for MS Word users (for those who don’t use graphics programs) and as .png files for those who do. As before, we’re also making our own calendar available in .pdf format for those who are interested. For our calendar we’ve used images made in that month (i.e. the image for May 2021 was made in May 2020). Because 2020 has been what it was, we didn’t do any significant travel off of Vancouver Island this year and 11 of the 12 images were made in and around the Victoria area. We did manage to trade Victoria for Tofino (on Vancouver Island’s wet coast) for a bit in October, and the image for that month was made in Ucluelet.
I created a template in MS Word that allows people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom, Affinity Photo or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars, so we’ll cover that first; the graphics stuff is below that. I used MS Word 2016 to make the template and saved it as a .docx file. Basically it’s a series of tables, one for each month, that look something like this:
Well worth 3:50 of your time. 🌳🌱🌲
_____
As I walk through the forest
the trees start to sway
to the music they hear
coming quietly
through my earphones
—-
The apple trees
shed their blooms
upon me
while laughing quietly
at my surprise…
—-
In a corporate boardroom
a $50B deal is made.
Far away, a baby laughs.
A grasshopper leaps.
Which one is most important?
Hugs,
M&M
We’re actually in Tofino, on Canada’s wet coast right now. Last Thursday marked four years since Mike’s dad passed away, so when we saw this man on the rocks admiring the view we thought of Pop. Wherever he is now, we’re sure he has a great view!
Hugs,
M&M
It’s been far too long since we’ve been able to go out and share Free Hugs with people, so we really appreciated seeing this today! Many thanks to Robert Martinez for the share and the smile. 🙂
Hugs,
M&M
Hi Folks:
This is the sixth of the YouTube videos we’ve done for the Victoria Photography Meetup Group. Since the videos are out in the wild anyway, we thought maybe we should put them up here as well. The last talk was on the basics of colour so this one is on making black and white (grayscale) images. For most people, the best way to make grayscale images is to shoot in colour and then convert the images into grayscale on the computer. We explore the reasons for that and a few ways to maximize that colour information…even when all you can see on your screen are shades of gray.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment below or fill out our contact form.
Hugs,
M&M
P.S. You can find the rest of our tutorial posts here. We’re closing in on a hundred now, I think.
P.S. II, the sequel. Harvey Stearn has an excellent post: Black & White Image-Making In the Digital Age. Well worth reading.
Hi Folks:
I haven’t made any of these in a while, but they can be fun. Take an image and crop it in half. Invert it, then paste the cropped image back in place. Push it around a bit in whatever software you’re using. You never know what the final result will yield. 🙂
Okay, that’s it for now. Go out and make some photographs!!
Hugs,
M&M
Hi folks:
This is the fifth of the YouTube videos we’ve done for the Victoria Photography Meetup Group. Since the videos are out in the wild anyway, we thought maybe we should put them up here as well. As I mention in the introduction, colour is a topic on which one could easily earn several PhDs. I’m not much above the Kindergarten level of understanding myself, but understanding the basics of light and colour is essential to photography – even if one only shoots black and white (grayscale) images.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment below or fill out our comment form.
Hugs,
M&M
P.S. You can find the rest of our tutorial posts here. We’re closing in on a hundred now, I think.
P.S. II, the sequel. A couple of links:
This Woman Sees 100 Times More Colors Than The Average Person
Online Simulator Shows You What Photos Look Like to People With Color Blindness
Hi folks:
This is the fourth of the YouTube videos we’ve done for the Victoria Photography Meetup Group. Since the videos are out in the wild anyway, we thought maybe we should put them up here as well. Most photographers make one image and use that – they may process it further, they may post it online and/or print it, but that image is it. There are some, however, who elect to use two to thousands of images to composite into one final image. There are at least a half-dozen reasons to do that; this video discusses four of them. Most of the work is done using Affinity Photo, but there are mentions of other software as well. BTW, the background software if you will, used to display and categorize the images is Capture One Pro 20.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment below.
Hugs,
M&M
P.S. You can find the rest of our tutorial posts here. We’re closing in on a hundred now, I think.