Random Photography

March 3, 2017 | Allison

I absolutely love Clara’s random photography posts, so I thought I would try to do a similar kind since I have plenty of random photos anyway. 🙂 I hope you enjoy!

Random Topic #1: Spring

I was about to say that spring is on the way, but then again, it’s 29 degrees outside, so… XD But the daffodils are blooming and the grass is getting green, so you at least THINK spring is here until you go outside.

dsc_0424-1280x853 — Ohhhh pictures like this make me happy with the golden sunshine on the green, green grass. So pretty!

Random Topic #2: Bonfire Days

I already wrote a post about a huge bonfire we had recently, but there were a few extra bonfire-related photos I didn’t show.

The fire was so hot that we couldn’t get close enough to roast hot dogs, so my grandaddy though of an ingenious solution! He hauled out some long, hollow metal poles and stuck the roasting sticks in the end. That way you could move them around from a safe distance. XD My uncle and brother, not to be outdone, just got up close to the fire and shielded themselves by putting their jackets over their heads. It was quite the hilarious scene, but it worked!

Oh, and we also cooked potatoes, but the photo of that was terrible, so I decided to leave it out. 😉 But that’s a really fun thing to do at a bonfire: wrap a few potatoes in aluminum foil, poke some holes in them with a fork, and bury them in hot coals from the fire. Apparently we left ours in a bit too long, because they had a nice thick shell of blackened potato around the edges ( XD XD ), but they were quite tasty in the middle! Hee hee!

random-6-1280x853 — Isn’t this picture so funny? XD

Megan and I took pictures of each other taking pictures of each other. That was confusing. XD

Aww, Maggie dear!

Another fun thing we did was play with glow sticks. We started by tossing them around out in the field, and discovered that if the person carrying the glow stick ran far enough into the darkness, the glow stick really looked like it was floating when they waved it around. It was so weird. After that, we cracked some of them open and drew on our hands. XD Probably NOT the wisest idea, because there is actually a tube of glass inside glow sticks that cracks too when you break it. So yeah, maybe not a good thing to “try at home”… but it was fun while it lasted! XD And it looked really weird – like you were glowing from the inside out.

Random Topic #3: Eyes

If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you might have noticed that I really like photographing and drawing eyes. I think they’re fascinating, and extra beautiful up close! I had fun editing these photos.

random-2-1280x1023 — Ohhh my goodness I love this photo so much! This is my friend’s eye, which I edited to look bluer than it really is. (But it is still so beautiful in real life!)

Eh, the pictures of my eye aren’t nearly as pretty, but I like all the different rings of color. 🙂 My eyes are definitely brown from a distance, but colorful up close.

random-4-1280x955 — This is a fun angle! It makes my eyelashes look super long, hehe. O.o XD

Random Topic #4: A Beauteous Sunset

Even if you haven’t been following my blog for very long, you might know that I also have a weakness for sunsets. XD I love how they’re all different, but all glorious (well, most of them)! I took these pictures at my grandparent’s house. The sunset was quite unique that night – the clouds looked like a washboard or something!

random-5-1280x853 — I edited this one (as you can tell).

Random Topic #5: Yummy Lemon Pies

Mom found this delicious recipe in the latest edition of “The Magnolia Journal” magazine. I tried it out, and it was pretty yummy and VERY rich. 🙂 One thing that we noticed is it could use a little bit more lemon juice next time. I didn’t fill the 2/3 cups super full since I was squeezing real lemons and I wanted to have an extra lemon for garnish.

I am quite happy with how the editing turned out on these photos. They still aren’t anything extraordinary, but they sure are better than this: *shudder* I did lots of different things, but some of the main ones were cooling the temperature of the photo, boosting highlights, and using the fancy focus and miniature effects.

Random Topic #6: Party Food

While we’re on the topic of food… XD

This has been a while – my little sister’s birthday was the middle of January, heh heh. XD But anyway, better late than never, right? My mom always makes us a custom cake, and my sister chose a fox. Mom saw this great idea for a coconut fox cake on Pinterest, and it turned out adorable! She also made fox cupcakes, but I didn’t get pictures of those.

For my sister’s birthday supper she chose bananas as one of her sides. 😀 I had fun playing around with banana “tattoos” to make them more special 😛 It’s actually really simple: just poke holes in the peel with a toothpick, and soon the holes will darken by themselves. So fun!

random-4-1280x853 — Ugh, sorry about the bad lighting.

Random Topic #7: Uh… I’m Not Sure What to Call This…

Heh heh. I just had two lonely pictures leftover, which I took on the day of the rabbit photoshoot. So here they are!

random-3-1280x853 — Well that was rather anti-climatic. XD

Well, that’s about it, folks! So what do you think? Do you like this kind of post? What was your favorite random topic?

Thanks for reading!

***Allison***

AAWC Challenge 3: Blue Eyes

April 21, 2016April 21, 2016 | Allison

Hey guys! I hope you’re not getting tired of contest entry posts. 😦 I’ll hopefully do a photography post tomorrow. (I still have WAY too many photos to show you!)

Anywho, I’m participating in Misty’s really fun writing challenge, Aspiring Authors Writing Challenge, or AAWC for short. (Read about it here.) (And see my other entries here.) The word prompt for this challenge was “Broken.” I can collect two extra points for my team if I work my team mascot (I’m on Team Swan) into the story, so I did! (Although I just mentioned it a little bit – does that still count, Misty?)

I took a photo of my friend’s eye recently and super-edited it. I included it because it fits perfectly with the story. In fact, the photo was kind of like an extra prompt for me.

And now, I present…

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Blue Eyes

I am Nadia. I am average – average height, average weight, average everything – except for my eyes. They are blue. Blue like the sky of long ago, my grandparents tell me. And that is why I leave tomorrow.

Mati and Pati, my grandparents, often tell us an old legend about our land back when it was bursting with color…

Our land was once beautiful and bountiful, the envy of every kingdom for miles around. But then the storm came. This was no puny rain shower; this was a storm. Dark gray clouds swept furiously across the sky, rumbling and grumbling with every step forward. They ripped themselves apart and drenched the land with their angry tears. It rained for days, then weeks, a long gray drizzle. Finally it stopped. Everyone rushed outside into the dimness, waiting for the sun to break through at last and turn the darkness into dancing, shining, living color again. But it never happened. The sun came out, true, but it was pale and peaked as if it had been through a long illness. It did not bring color with it. The storm had killed the color, crushed it, and shattered it. Ever since there has been no color in our land.

Besides the blue of my eyes, these are the only colors I know: black like midnight without stars, white like the swan that eats our breadcrumbs tossed into the lake, and the infinite shades and tints of gray in between. My eyes are the only spots of color in our otherwise colorless land. Our world is broken and no one can fix it.

Except for… me.

My grandparents always tell me at the end of their story, “You are the only one who can mend our broken land with your blue, blue eyes. You are the only one who can keep color alive.”

So I leave tomorrow, after I turn ten years old. I will make the long journey over the gray mountains alone, and I will bring color home. I remember exactly what I must do: I must fill my cupped hands to overflowing with color, and carry my precious burden carefully homeward, sustaining the color and keeping it alive with occasional glances from my blue eyes through the colorless grayness. I must bring healthy color home, and lay it gently on the ground. Then, Mati and Pati say that the color will take root like a flower, and grow and spread throughout the land until at last, there will be dancing, shining, living color again.

That is my mission: to mend my broken land with my blue, blue eyes. And I will carry it out.

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I am terribly glad that our world is not like Nadia’s! Wouldn’t it be so sad if God hadn’t made our world colorful? (Well, of course we wouldn’t know any better then, but still…)

I hope you enjoyed reading this! Have a colorful day!

***Allison***

Yay for Picture Edits!

January 18, 2016January 18, 2016 | Allison

I ♥ PicMonkey! PicMonkey is a really fun, free, picture-editing website. I’ve been playing around on it lately, and I thought I’d show you some of the results.

I made this with one of my dandelion pictures, this using this tutorial, and I also added a border.

This is another edited dandelion photo, which I edited to look like night.

I really had fun with a certain sunset picture I took. A few weeks ago there was a pretty sunset, and I got a rather washed-out phot for some reason, which I saved for precisely this kind of thing. If you put a texture over a white spot in your photo, the results are amazing! This is the picture I used to make the edits. Blah right? But then…

These are the edits!

I especially really like the top one, but I think the bottom one is neat because it looks like the mountains are an underwater world beneath the surface of an ocean. 🙂 I might make a story prompt post sometime with some of my edits.

This is an edit of my dad’s eye. The picture looks basically the same, I just added a filter. My dad thinks his eye looks really old in that picture, which I guess it kind of does, but I think it looks beautiful – I love the starburst of colors in his iris!

And here is just a funny one to end with. 😀 Cute lil’ Maggie!

Tee-hee! Isn’t she adorable?

Which edit was your favorite? Sometime I want to do a contest where I post, maybe three pictures, and then people edit them on PicMonkey and see who wins the best edit of each photo! But I’ll wait till WordCrafters is over. Oh, my sister is actually doing a neat photography challenge right now that I can’t wait to do! Click here to see it.

***Allison***