10/31/24

 It's the last day of October.  It's also Halloween here in this country which is a fun day of decorations and candy.  😂  Today's image is just a fun creation I photoshopped  together of some decorations I saw this past week and an abandoned house in PA.

12/31/23

 It's the last Steamy Sunday of 2023!  What an interesting date to end the year on as well.  Happy New Year's Eve everyone!  Hope next year will be better than this one for all of us.  Today's image is a composite one.  The locomotive wasn't even taken in the evening and the fireworks are from the last time I was able to see and photograph some which was a couple of years ago now.  Hope you enjoy it.

 

10/31/23

 Happy Halloween everyone!  Hope you have a fun day!  A bit of trivia.  Halloween is a contraction of All Hallows' Eve which is the evening before All Saints' Day, also known as All Hallows' Day.  Halloween has it's roots in the ancient Celtic festival 0f Samhain which was a pagan religious celebration to welcome harvest at the end of summer.

Hope you enjoy my image, it's a photo manipulation of a couple of different images.

8/5/23

 Today's image is from the same park trail I was on in Pennsylvania, Thornwald Park, that I shared last week.  This is from a different spot on the trail and I decided to play with the image a bit.  I liked how it turned out, your mileage may vary.  😄

12/31/22

 Happy New Year's Eve!  We made it to the end of 2022.  It was a long year in some ways and it went very fast in others.  Hopefully the next year will be better.  We shall see what it brings.  About the photo, yes I am quite the party animal.  😉

10/31/22

 Happy Monday and Happy Halloween!  Today's image is just something fun I created for the day.  Of course it had to reference one of my favorite subjects.  Hope you enjoy it.

10/31/21

 It's Steamy Sunday here on the Blog and it is also Halloween!  I hope you enjoy my little creation for the day.  Have a fun and safe one and don't eat too much candy!

7/4/21

 Happy Independence Day America!  It's also SteamySunday here on the Blog.  I decided to play with an image and see if I could create something that worked and I think I did.  I like it anyway.  😁  This is a locomotive from the Cumbres & Toltec at the lunch stop at Osier.  The sky is added and the photo adjusted to look more realistic.  This is another photo that just goes to show you can't really trust all the images you see to be real.

6/6/21

 It's Steamy Sunday here on the Blog and a double digit day.  😀  I have a new photo program that I have been teaching myself to use and I taught myself how to do the Pencil technique I have used in Photoshop before.  This is another dip into the archives with an image from the Grand Canyon Railway using the Pencil Look technique.

5/1/21

 Happy May Day!  Today's image is not real.  I took both photos that this is made from but not at the same time.  This is a good example of how you should not believe a lot of the images you see on the internet.  If they are just too good to believe, they probably are faked.  Rarely does everything come together just perfectly.  I have a new photo program and I was playing with it and found how, actually, ridiculously easy it is to produce a more dramatic image than what mostly comes out of the camera.  It dawned on me even more that a really stunning photo is most likely not "real".  Not that this one is stunning but it had more visual interest to me than eith of the images it was made from had on their own.

A rainbow image I took over a field a year or two ago merged with a windmill I shot recently while on a bike ride.

7/25/20

I don't normally post 2 of the same subject in a week but this is an event that's going on right now and you will be running out of chances to see it.  Comet Neowise is making it's way out of the solar system and won't be seen again in many lifetimes.  You will probably need binoculars to find it if you are looking for it now because each night as it moves away it becomes dimmer.  This is actually a composite image.  I wanted this look of Milford lake and the comet together but as you could see in Monday's photo, realistically that wasn't possible.  Many images you see on the internet of it where is looks pretty big in comparison to a foreground object are most likely a composite.  Milford Lake was shot at 18mm wide angle and the Comet was done at 48mm.  Both images were made at 6 seconds long.

6/28/20

Steamy Sunday has rolled around again!  I don't share steam traction engines very often but I liked how this one turned out and this is a bit of a special occasion.  So in the past I have always referred to this 20 HP Minneapolis as "the engine my husband gets to work on".  Now I get to refer to it as the engine we own.  The owner decided to sell it this year and gave us the opportunity to buy it and we did.  It will remain in Minnesota for now.  In this image it is working on a saw mill at Rollag along with a return flu Minneapolis that the same previous owner used to own but has now also sold.

5/12/20

Something a bit different for today.  I took these photos at the same focal length and on the same evening only about 2 mins apart but unfortunately did not capture the helicopters with the moon all at once.  It took a ridiculous amount of time for 2 images, shot so close together, to get this image to look like I wanted but I finally managed it.  2 Fort Riley helicopters in flight along with the rising moon.

5/3/20

It's Steamy Sunday once again.  I am having fun with playing with old photos and trying new things.  Here is another oldie from the Durango & Silverton Railway in Colorado from my first visit there.  I enhanced the out of frame look a bit more with some B&W work as well.

4/30/20

The first butterfly I was able to photograph this year was this Black Swallowtail.  I was only able to capture it in some grass and it was fairly boring so I decided to play around with it and this is the result.  

4/26/20

With the world the way it is these days I may not get much opportunity to photograph steam trains this year except my garden railway.  I was thinking of ways to be inspired and I saw images done in this type of "Pop Out" or "Out of Frame" style and decided to try my own.  I liked the result and decided to share it.  This is an older image from Durango & Silverton in Colorado that I use on my computer as one of my rotating desktop images that i thought lent itself very well to the technique.

2/17/20

I was playing around this weekend with some photos and I came up with this and was pleased with how it turned out.  A composite image of a rose and frozen bubble.

12/31/19

Today is the last day of 2019 and the last day of the teen years.  The decade is not actually over until a year from now but heading into the 20s seems pretty significant.  I hope this year was a good one for you and I hope the year to come will be even better.  May it bring you health and happiness.

10/31/19

Hello and Happy Halloween!  Hope you have a fun and safe time!  I enjoy seeing all the kids in their costumes.  Might be a bit chilly for them here as we may have snow.  I am writing this earlier in the week and that is what the forecast called for.  Stay warm out there too!

7/4/19

Happy Independence Day everyone here in the US!  This is a composite image from the fireworks show I watched in Wamego Kansas last year.  They put on quite the spectacular show.