While giving the girls a ride to school, I took a shortcut and happened to find this house. I am so in love with the whole idea of it. There are signs everywhere. “Support our troops.” “Recycle.” The sign you see above. By the way, when I drove by the first time there was a trash back hooked to the fence with cans in it. When I came back to take the picture the bag was gone. So much for directions. 

Even the truck is covered with signs. I’ve seen it around town before. The back says something like “If a [insert description of driver here] is not driving this, it is STOLEN!” How fabulous is that? It reminds me of Frank and his painted truck. Sometimes I think that people are so worried about being perfect that they forget the beauty of being original. And then I see something like this and it makes me happy.

I am backup letter K in The Alphabet Project:

Every two weeks the person whose letter of the alphabet it is sets a photographic task for both themselves and the other 25 photographers. The task that the photographer sets can be an adjective, a noun, a specific instruction, a verb etc but it must start with the same letter as the first letter in their name. [more]

The first task started on March 1st and begins with the letter A, specifically Alternative Accomodation:

“We all need somewhere to live. Most of us live in a conventional dwelling; house, apartment, flat, duplex, townhouse, converted garage, attic etc. These dwellings are part of the fabric of contemporary society.

However there are some that do not fit the mold of what is considered everyday or normal within ‘contemporary society’. Call them drifters, homeless, misfits, dreamers, hobos, their accommodations are in a continual state of flux.

The assignment is to photograph a dwelling that would be considered ‘alternative’ to what we call home. It might be a car, boat, cardboard box, tent, tree or an unconventional building or structure.

Good luck and I would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone the very best with their endeavors for the alphabet project.

Here’s to a great year of photos!”

I finally took my photo. The one I’m posting here isn’t the one I submitted, but you get the idea… I loved that the cat that was leashed to the bike. It was so beautiful ~ solid white with a shiny collar. The owners were eating inside the restaurant, so I tucked a $10 bill into the blankets packed on the back of the bike. It is always fun to find money.

I took pictures of our cat. The end.

When flickr added Picnik to the list of available services, I was intrigued. Any ‘real’ photographer is going to have ‘real’ photo editing tools. Why use an online editor? Personally, I don’t use photoshop. I rarely edit film photos and for digital pics I use Picasa. I’ve been happy with it, but there are some limitations. Picnik offers more choices than Picasa does. Not only are there more options, but there is also a greater amount of control over the various effects.

The Basics
The photo on the left is an original cameraphone picture. It’s fine as-is, but I wasn’t happy with the floor showing in the bottom right hand corner. In about thirty seconds, I cropped the picture, sharpened the focus, enhanced the colors and straightened it a bit. This sort of quick and easy editing is perfect for snapshots that don’t warrant a lot of time or effort.

Premium Stuff
In addition to the basics, Picnik offers premium effects that mimic different film types. Normally, I’m not a fan of ‘fake lomo’ type stuff. If you want it to look like film, go buy some film and shoot. Mamirosa gifted me a three month premium trial and I’ve been enjoying it much more than I expected. A little goes a long way, but it is fun to experiment with different looks.

Here is another camaraphone picture. The original [left] is fine, but adding the Holga-ish effect draws attention to the pattern without the distraction of color.

flickr + picnik = true love forever
The best thing about picnik is being able to edit my many, many camera phone pictures without having to download them/edit/upload. I send them to flickr directly from my phone and anything that cuts down on the time I have to spend on the computer is a good thing. Fewer steps means more time for other things. The only issue that I’ve had so far is that when I edit a photo in flickr, the premium services are not available. I am prompted to upgrade. This isn’t a problem because all of my flickr photos are available through the picnik website. I can make changes, add them to sets, edit tags and privacy all from picnik.com. Not bad!

See my photos on flickr tagged with Picnik!