A Picture a Day – Day 6
Today is day #6 of my Picture a Day challenge – that means just one more day to go!
Today’s pic is of a bit of the desert-y vistas you will see at the new Radiator Springs Racers ride at the California Adventure park at Disneyland Resort.
When Chris and I were there at the Disney Resort for our honeymoon, 98% of the pictures I took were with my iPhone 4S… I made a decision to leave my SLR camera at home so I didn’t get so caught up in photography and focused on enjoying our honeymoon trip.
As we would be in lines for various rides, we would both end up with our iPhones in hand, reading email, showing each other hilarious photos saw on Facebook, checking out the wait times for other rides and I would sometimes play with new photo editing apps that I’ve picked up.
A couple of months ago, I downloaded an app called Filter Mania which I have found to be a lot of fun. While I was in line for Space Mountain, I received a message that another of Dropico’s new apps called Colormania was available for free for a limited time. (It is not yet available on iTunes)
I decided to play with the Radiator Springs Racers photo that I had snapped earlier in the morning. It was a particularly cloudy morning with flat grey clouds that made for a SUPER bright background – too bright for me to get a very nice photo with my iPhone, but I snapped the pic anyway since I figured I could play with it later.
First, I added a couple of layers in Filtermania, and then I went to Colormania to play with the color levels a bit… here are the results, which are WAY better than the original!
Altered Radiator Springs Racers
There are so many photo editing apps out there that it’s hard to choose. I’ve downloaded so many free ones that didn’t work well, but once in a while you get a REAL gem that you go back to over and over. Filtermania is like that, and Colormania looks like it will be another one. An in-depth review of both apps to come!
A Photo a Day – Day 4
While I was out running errands, I found a happy little tree! (has Bob Ross been here?) 🙂
A Photo a Day – Day 3
We had yet another beautiful sunset here in San Francisco tonight!
I stopped in the middle of the crosswalk on Mission St. near the Moscone Center to snap this one.
A Picture a Day?
Posting at least one picture a day can be quite the challenge, as I found out in 2011 when I decided that I would do so for 6 months.
It wasn’t taking the pictures that was a problem, but disciplining myself to actually upload them. At the time, I was using Facebook exclusively for this, and at that point the process was a tedious one with the uploads timing out quite often.
I made it for 5-1/2 months… Not a bad run, really but still short of my 6 month goal.
I am once more seriously considering it, only this time it would be for 1 year, and this time I would upload all of the photos to this blog.
Short term, I’m challenging myself to one solid week of daily photo uploads, starting with this pic:
These are the lights at the entrance to the Superdry Store at the San Francisco Centre. Normally they have old-fashioned looking incandescent bulbs in them, but since Thanksgiving they’ve had beautiful colored ones for the Christmas season. I’m a sucker for glass and colored lights!
See, I’m NOT Crazy!
So… remember the jellyfish cloud I mentioned in my earlier post tonight? WELL….
It so happens that my friend Karl Chavarria has a friend, Jim, who works with him in Downtown Portland, not terribly far from where I was at lunchtime today, and HE (Jim) took a picture of said cloud!
I think the cloud next to it looks sorta like a Metroid. Take a look at the JELLYFISH CLOUD!
More Sewing Machine Woes And A Few Other Tidbits
This post marks evening #2 of sewing machine problems – I thought I had it all figured out. Guess again!
I went back to “the project” thinking that a full day of not working on it might make all the difference in figuring out exactly what my darn sewing machine was doing, or not doing, as the case may be.
Yesterday evening, I realized that my thread kept slipping off of this metal arm thing that bobs up and down and that the tension must not be correct. This action kept resulting in the thread bunching up and feeding down underneath the panel directly under the needle, thus making a tangled mess. (I really should find out what all those parts are called)
So…. after a couple of times of this, plus a few other mishaps (sheesh, this was supposed to be an easy project compared to Sock Monkey!) I decided to call it quits for the evening. Fast forward to today…. I deduced that the tension problem must be caused by the bobbin somehow, perhaps because it didn’t have enough thread? VOILÁ! Problem solved!
Bobbin re-threaded and put back into place, threads ready to go, I started sewing. WRONG! Same bunching of thread. WHAT?! Okay…. un-tangle, check the tension, try again… same problem! Still not knowing what is wrong, I abandoned “the project” for yet another evening and ran to the solace of my computer. After a little look into the sewing machine manual perhaps it will become clear. (ha – perhaps I should have done that in the first place!)
Something non-sewing related would be the un-usual clouds I saw today… cirrus clouds, mostly. Cool and crisp are a couple of good adjectives for the weather today… it was also very sunny.
One of the clouds looked like, I kid you not, a jellyfish. I have no proof of said jelly fish because all I had with me was my iPhone and it was just too small of a cloud to show up well on an iPhone photo.
It’s on days like this that I kick myself for not hauling my heavy camera gear around with me everywhere. If I had my SLR handy, my lunch hour would have been filled with delightful picture snapping, but the camera remained at home, lonely in the solitude of my townhouse. Poor thing. I think it gets lonely when I don’t take it on outings.
It wasn’t until I went back inside from my lunch hour that I remembered my little Canon PowerShot SD780 IS, the ELPH. Bah. Silly Boo – it’s always in your purse. *sigh*
I may have opportunity in the next couple of days for some nice snowy pictures, and perhaps some spectacular (or perhaps less spectacular and more average) icy photos, as we are expecting a snow storm followed directly by freezing rain. Bad conditions for driving, excellent conditions for photography!
Until such time, I leave you with a small glimpse of “the project”…
Ooooo, what is this?!