Wish me luck.

I entered the following image to a photo contest:The theme was "Before and After" digital processing. The title of this image is "Cleaning up a dirty horse." The horse on the picture is Bernina and I created this image as a tribute to a wonderful Trakehner mare. The processed image already received a remarkable fifth place of a hundred in a previous competition. The participants come from all over the world and many of them are professional photographers, which makes me get a bit ambitious. You can see the first competition here: http://contests.fotki.com/contests/pblack/
The image was edited using Photoshop 8, which is a pretty basic version of Photoshop, but sufficient for hobby photographers like me. First step was eliminating the background and enhancing color and detail of Bernina's face. To blend out the overexposed flank area, I just added some texture to cover it and softened it by blurring the texture part and making it a little bit more transparent. I hope you like the result ! :-)

Again, clicking on the image will show it full size.

Winter again ?

Last week we had temperatures around the 70 degree mark and a few days later, old man winter struck again. Tessa thought it was great. The Budelheimers on the other hand.............

Bica get's cold real easy. Her fur isn't great, which is partially due to her bad breeding. Poor thing does not have the best of genes and God knows what's been mixed into her heritage. Nonetheless - Rodney and Tessa had fun in the snow and here are a few pictures of the gang enjoying - or not - the white stuff:

...and Bicalina is trying to appear amused:

Gosh - February is almost over !

...and I have neglected this blog yet again. How can I expect people to check it out if I don't post on a regular basis ? Thing is, that sometimes nothing significant happens and ranting about the bad stuff that's going on in the world isn't too much fun either. Finally I do have some really exciting news: The best hubby of all gave me a really nice present. A present, that combined birthday, xmas, easter, valentine's and then some. He gave me a new camera and the timing couldn't have been better, because I wasn't able to move around very much. I hurt my back and everybody who's ever hurt their back knows, how painful that is. That gave me some time to try out the new cam and here are some of the results. Squirrels and birds first and tomorrow the dogs. Please do click on the image to view it full size:


















You see that a good camera makes good pictures. Even for me, who's been told over and over that her pictures aren't all that great. I think, my new Olympus E-620 helps to improve my reputation. :-) BTW: These pictures were taken with a 70-300 lens.

All images are copyrighted !