Facebook cover photos - just for fun.

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I like playing with The Gimp. If you're not familiar with The Gimp, it's basically an open source, free imaging tool that does many of the same things that Photoshop can do. Here's a small collection of random things I've done with The Gimp.

These are all formatted to fit as a Facebook cover photo. Feel free to download and share. (To get to the "real" photo, click on the image, wait for the full size to load, the right click and choose "save image".)

A few of these might be kind of "out there". I produced them by asking for random words on Facebook, then trying to put them all in one picture.

Dalek

Fake Nature

Coffee

Insomnia

Light Show

Love

Still Life with Vampire

Why?

The Ubiquitous Big Toy Hydrangea

Phylogenous Finnimbrun Yak

See How Much I Love You

Fake Space

Cuteness

First attempt at HDR

First attempt at doing HDR. Tree with purple.

 Here's the best lit version of the original scene.

Some photo-shooping.

Here's a  picture from Tasha's wedding.  Chris and Dagmar of Hippie Boy Design and  Photography did a great job and we  owe them a huge debt of gratitude.

I wanted to have some fun so I chose this one to play around with:

This is a great picture of the bride and groom. However, the background is a bit distracting. No fault of the photographer, it's just what he had to work with. So I'm going to try and make the subjects pop a little more.

Three things stand out that just need to go. In the corner is a bit of a Christmas wreath, by the brides shoulder is a window frame, and just above the grooms head is a weird reflection that kind of looks like horns.

I use Gimp. It's this fantastic open-source program that does most things that Photoshop does.

Using the clone tool, I simply used elements of the background near the elements I wanted to remove and covered them up.

The next thing I wanted was to turn the background black and white. So I copied the layer, desaturated it, and using a layer mask, trimmed the subject from the color layer.

Then, using the blur filter, I made it the background fuzzy.

Then I cropped it to 8X10.

Here's the end result:

Here's the two side by side:

If you'd like a detailed account of the edits, let me know! I'll write it up.

PS. Here's a third iteration. This one took a little more work. Can you spot the changes?

Things I didn't know I missed.

Since our recent trip back to the Midwest for my sister-in-law's wedding, we've been thinking more and more about moving back there. There's so much there that we didn't know we missed living out here in the desert, until we were there. Here's a few things I missed, and a few I didn't.

Things I didn't know I missed

1. Green Growing things
New Mexico is basically a desert. Even in town, the color green is pretty rare.

Unless you have a lot of money to spend on water to keep grass green and flowers growing, your yard is probably brown. Ours happens to be sand. Lots of sand. In the Midwest, there is green. Lots of green. Many shades of green. Things grow. And grow well.
2. Cicadas
The musical whirring of their song is the background music to so many of my summer time memories. I never noticed how oddly quiet it seems without them surrounding and covering us in their singing.
3. Humid air
The air in the desert is dry. Very dry. So dry at times that it seems that exhaling sucks all the moisture out of your body. Your lungs seem to be shriveling when you are outside in the heat. You have to keep water with you all the time so you don't die. In the Midwest, the air is heavy and wet. Breathing in seems to fill your body with life giving water, making your lungs feel more like full round fruit rather than dry, shriveled raisins.      
4.  Water
Water is a precious commodity in the desert. There is no standing water anywhere, except the reservoirs which are dirty and sandy. In the Midwest, there are rivers and streams everywhere. When it rains, there are puddles that will last for days. If you dig in your back yard, you can have a well. Precious, life giving water, everywhere!

Things I didn't know I didn't miss

1. Green Growing things
Things that grow produce pollen. Pollen is evil. My allergies are screaming for mercy. Often, when my eyes are swollen and my nose is so stuffed I can't breath, I think "Kill Me". Green things are evil.
2. Cicadas
Stupid bugs buzzing all the time. How can anyone think with all this racket? How did I ever sleep at night with these things whirring all the time? Shut up already!
3. Humid air
In the desert, when the sun goes down, it gets cool, fast. Humidity holds the heat forever. It can be 103 in the day and 103 in the dead of night. And you can't sweat! It just drenches you and never really cools you! How can humans live like this?
4. Water
Every bit of standing water is covered in mosquitoes. They cover your body like thousands of little vampires trying to suck the life out of you. And if you swat one, it explodes all over you leaving a nasty splatter of blood like something out of a Freddy Kruger movie. Yuck. Also, water makes the growing thing grow and contributes to the humid air, so generally speaking, water is probably the thing that I missed the least. Except that I'm very thirsty.

Some More Artsy Kind of Stuff

A random hill getting some snow. Somewhere along I-25

An outlet in the hotel room. The texture amused me.

Decorative cinder block wall.

Stroller wheel on concrete.

I don't know this person, she was just having a smoke. But I was trying to capture the symmetry between the trees and the concrete light fixtures.

Went for a walk today...

One of the benefits of exercising lately is that I am able to walk again. Let me clarify. When I fell ill, I developed a great deal of weakness on my left side. I never completely lost my ability to walk, but I did lose my ability to walk PURPOSEFULLY. I could walk around the house, but I couldn't be on my feet very long to actually GO somewhere, like around the block with my wife, through the store at Wal-Mart, things like that.

Today I had to go with my wife to her classes because I had a doctor's appointment and the only way to get there was to hang around with her most of the day. I didn't have time to do my usual work out on the Wii fit, so I opted for walking around on campus while she was in class. To keep myself motivated, I brought the camera with me. While it was difficult and I was very sore and exhausted when I stopped, I was able to walk around for about an hour. I don't think I went very far, but I did have a good time snapping some random pictures around campus.

This is a little outdoor amphitheater. I think these are lights, but they may be drains. I liked the stair-step pattern from where I was standing.

A random rain spout.

These lamp posts are just one example of how the campus has embraced the traditional designs and patterns of the Navajo and Apache peoples, who are he majority in this area.

Fence with handrail. I for one am very grateful that there are many of these around campus to help folks like me up and down the inclines.

The clock tower, from the base. Kinda hard to see the time, but it looks a lot taller this way.

Fence and shadow.

Rain spout. Yes, we do get rain once in a while. Though normally the sky is the brilliant blue that you see through the hole.

Another lamp post.

Shadow on steps. I thought the zig-zag was fun.

Yes we do have trees, though this is one of the biggest in the area. It's about 30 feet tall.

This statue is called "The Shepherdess". I didn't catch the artist's name. Sheep and goats are how many Native American people on the Reservations make a living.

Limestone wall. There are limestone accents almost everywhere you look, indoors and out.

One of the student lounge areas has display cases all around in the walls. This one had some archeological pieces to share.

Another had some interesting geological specimens. I have no idea what this rock is, but it is very colorful.

Yes, there are some green plants besides cactus that grow here. Unfortunately, they only grow inside. This is the botany lab.

And finally, I celebrated my new-found mobility by eating one of each of these out of the candy machine.

Geek-o-lantern

Captain! It's the Enterprise!