Dixieland delight

Sorry I'm such a blogging tease. I was quite the active blogger last week, and then nothing. Whatever did you do with yourselves? I apologize. But I was MIA for good reason: My little sister turned 21, so I went down to Alabama for a visit. Coincidentally, this past weekend was also her school's Homecoming, and she was in charge of the parade (wow!), so I thought I'd share a few photos here. Don't worry, crafty endeavors will return soon. I've actually been fairly productive recently despite all the election brouhaha and lots of exciting copy editing.

It took a lot of work -- and sweet-talking -- to get the parade going, but everything eventually fell into place, the judges took their seats and the show began.











Then it was time for football (No.-1-team-in-the-nation football, if I might add)...





We sat in the student section, which made me feel old...



But we were next to the Queen, which was cool.



Of course, there were typical birthday shenanigans as well.



Looks like she liked her gifts.



All in all, a good weekend. Happiness.

Maudlin

So I’ve been quite the busy blogger bee recently. I’m not sure what it is; maybe fall inspires me. Anyhow, I mentioned in my Gimpy post that I had some before-and-after photos to show off my photo-editing skills. Well, I lied. I actually only have the afters. Flickr won’t let me upload any more pictures this month without paying money -- and let’s be honest; I don’t need to spend money right now to put photos on flickr. We are on the verge of recession after all. But I thought I’d share the after images anyway. They are quite lovely, if I say so myself. They were taken with my old camera. So I guess I jumped the gun in blogging about my new toy yesterday. I promise more shots from the D90 are coming soon -- perhaps as soon as tomorrow.

My sister came up to visit earlier this month, and we did a few touristy things, including a stroll along the Potomac and a visit to the Jefferson Memorial.

Apparently it’s not a good idea to scuba dive in the Potomac. Who knew?


Some tourists at Jefferson.


Views of the monuments from the East Potomac Park bridge.




Last weekend, a couple of friends and I went for a romantic drive to Middleburg, Va., for some small-town charm, shopping and to wish we were rich and owned horse farms in the country.




Richele and Amanda amuse themselves while I take pictures.

Stimulating the economy

Get excited, folks. The photo quality on this blog is about to get better. This weekend, in a moment of fiscal irresponsibility/economic duty, I went out and bought myself a new camera. A new Nikon D90, to be precise. After an hour of haggling over, well, nothing with the sales girl and a sizable depletion of my bank account, I am now the proud owner of my very own digital SLR. And I couldn't be happier. I love my old camera. It's a very nice digital prosumer (Nikon Coolpix 5700) -- it was top of the line when I got it in 2002 -- but six years is a long time in digital camera years, and it was time for an upgrade.

My old lovely:


My new lovely:


I haven't gotten to play around with it as much as I would like yet because the majority of this weekend was spent hiding from the rain or scurrying to meet some fast-approaching deadlines for work. But here are a couple of shots of randomness to quell your appetites (OK, to quell my appetite). Soon enough, my friends, soon enough. Happy Monday.

More socks

I just finished editing a few more pictures of my brother's work socks. They're all up on Ravelry (subtropicalkatie), but I thought I'd share them here too.














Halloween place mat sock blocker

Gimpy

Photography has always been something I’ve enjoyed and dabbled with. In my high school journalism classes more than a decade ago (yikes!), we learned all about composure and framing, contrast and light, as well the technical aspects of using SLR cameras -- film back in those days, not digital. Another aspect of those classes was learning to use Photoshop for editing the photos. I quickly learned that just as a good editor can turn an average piece of writing into a literary masterpiece, a good photo editor can do the same for a photograph, albeit with more technical tools. Luckily (?) for me, I was in school for many, many years beyond high school, so I was able to keep easy access to Photoshop. Those academics love their fancy software. But ever since I’ve been out in the *real* world, my life has been sadly Photoshop-free.

I still enjoy photography. And I have still edited my photos -- to some degree. But until recently, it was not at the level that I would have liked. I got a free copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements somewhere, but it just offended me with its simplicity. So essentially I haven’t had access to good photo-editing software since 2006. Until now.

Thanks to my good friend Hilary’s advice, I downloaded Gimp. It’s freeware, which is awesome compared with $700 for CS4. But it’s got a lot of the capabilities -- and functions very similarly to -- the old Photoshop I know and love. So far I’ve just used it on my PC at work because I don’t have Internet at home. So I don’t know how it will work on my Mac, but as soon as Verizon stops hating me and I’m back in Web-land, I plan on downloading that version and testing it out as well.

I’m an idiot and forgot my jump drive at home today with all my before-and-after edited photos to show off (again, no Internet at home -- so frustrating). I had all these lovely images of fall leaves and DC scenes. But oh well. Instead, I’ll show you Richele. Richele is Washington’s newest Examiner blogger, and she needed a profile picture for her bio. So she called on me, her trusty life assistant, to help out. Here’s the picture we started with. Obviously she didn’t want other people in the shot, but she liked this picture. So I told her I’d work some magic.



Normally I’m not one to alter reality (i.e., delete light posts, flip images, etc.), but I figured since this was for a bio picture, it was OK to take out all the background noise so it didn’t appear that she had strange plastic things growing out of her head. I didn’t have a lot of time to work on it, so the contrast between her head and the background is a little fuzzier than I'd like. But all in all, I -- and she -- was pleased. And now I'm spreading the word about Gimp, which I'm the last person in the world to know about, per usual.

My Mosaic

I saw this over at One Scheme of Happiness, and it looked fun!

-Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
-Using only the first page, pick an image.
-Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into the mosaic maker.

The Questions:
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name

Here's mine:



1. Katie and Nichole, 2. I *heart* Tater Tots, 3. Cuthbert, 4. I want to be where the Sun warms the sky, 5. CROP CIRCLE MAKER - Matthew Williams, 6. i love you water. i miss you diet coke., 7. Iceberg Graveyard in Antarctica, 8. Chocolate Cupcakes, 9. one would., 10. Autumn in the Mountains, 11. L'été indien, 12. Great Wooden Roof