It was an uneventful ride back home from our holiday camp site at Ballina. We have stayed in cabins before and to my way of thinking it makes a lot of sense to book a cabin for a couple of nights than to go to the expense of owning, outfitting and towing a caravan and then have to find some place to stow the van in the months that it is not used. We have stayed in a few different caravan park cabins and were only unhappy about one - and that was because of all the cockroaches that came out when the lights went out - we ended up keeping the lights on all night! Ugh!
We had a great "welcome home" and almost immediately my son arrived and he and Colin started to put up the camper trailer in the back yard - teenage granddaughter and friends were going to have a birthday camp-out.

This event had been planned for her birthday in May but it happened to rain and spoil the fun. So today is not really Taylah's birthday but she and eight other girls are going to have a sleepless night tonight safe in our back yard!

Pizza and lollies and a cheesecake have been devoured and I am sure they are all hyped up with coca-cola too! They have had a camp fire - which has now burned down to a little glow and they are all cosy inside the big tent - we put a sealed electric/oil radiator in with them because the nights are so cold (and because this sort of heater cannot cause a fire).

Here Colin and Taylah's little sister are helping to get the trailer ready for the night.
It will be interesting in the morning to see how tired the girls are! I wonder how many ghost stories will be told!
AJ

A simple and fun technique for Photoshop Elements

While playing with my photos today I taught myself how to remove a large empty space from a photo. My picture had items in the foreground then a large area that was empty before there was more in the distance. Closing up the empty space makes a great difference. Here is how it is done.
My picture started out looking like this

From the menu bar, click on Image>Recompose.
Nothing appears to have happened - but at the bottom of the screen there are two new controls

By default, when you touch the picture you will find you have a brush that allows you to paint over the parts of the photo that you do not want to damage. If there are people in the picture, be sure to touch each and every one or they could end up distorted! This is how I touched the parts I wanted to keep safe.

Now you need to click on the lower brush - the one with the minus sign beside it - to show which part or parts of the image you do not mind losing.

Once again I used a freehand line to mark the width of sand I wanted to remove.
I then clicked outside of the picture and this gave me the crop bounding box - you can see the nodes on the image above,
I then left mouse clicked on the centre bottom node and pushed the node upwards.

At the bottom of the image appeared the usual two symbols that you chose to accept the change or cancel. I selected the "check" symbol. When the bottom of the picture was pushed upwards the areas that were covered with green did not alter their shape at all. I did notice that the blank area of sky at the top was compressed even though I had not indicated one way or the other what I wanted to happen there.
The picture now has a transparent space that needs to be removed. So the next action is to use the regular crop tool.

When the crop boundary is exactly where you want it, left mouse click  the "Check" mark.
If you glance across at the Layers Palette you will notice that the image is now a layer. This means that it needs to be "Flattened" before it can be saved as a "jpg".

To flatten an image either go to the Menu bar and click on Layer>Flatten Image or in the Layers palette right click on the layer and left click on Flatten Image .
This technique can be used vertically as well as horizontally and the results are quite amazing! You have to try it!
AJ

Second day of travel

With only a six hours driving ahead of us Colleen and I did not leap out of our beds until after seven and then had a leisurely breakfast and loaded the car. The key was returned to the reception and off we went – eight o clock wasn’t too bad! Our later start meant that we would avoid the heavy traffic of morning rush hour.

Once again we had a beautiful sunny day so the scenery was seen at its best. Our lunch stop was at the side of the road in a rather busy parking and picnic bay but we were fortunate to find a sheltered table and seats. Pulled in a little way from our table was a small truck on which trays of fruit and veggies were displayed for sale. After clearing away our lunch things and packing them in the car Colleen ambled over and bought a box of nectarines to take to the relative she was going to stay with in Canberra.

 In the afternoon I was ready for a break from driving and there seemed to be no picnic bays anywhere so I took an exit an drove 3 kilometers to a service station at a small town. In the car park was a small market so after enjoying a rather bitter coffee (our own would have been much nicer!) we wandered around the half dozen stalls and both Colleen and I picked up a little trinket that will go into our “Christmas present” collection! We enjoyed the exchange of banter with the stall holder! He did too!

This time the GPS took us to the motel I had booked on line without a fault. I checked in at about 4.15 had a quick look around, took Colleen in to have a look too before we drove on to the suburb of Cook to where Colleen was going to stay.

I was introduced to Shirley and her daughter Pat and we had a delightful meal together before I begged my leave and returned to my “lonely” room to write my little story for this blog. I even set up the pani-blog (my pistol grip camera/camcorder) ion a little tripod and took a shot of myself with my laptop!

I think I must have run my fingers through my hair because I seem to have lost my fringe! Do I look tired? I am now, so I will post this and do something about it!

AJ

Canberra Trip - Leaving Home

Both Colleen (my lady friend from Brisbane) and I found it almost impossible to sleep soundly with a big day of driving ahead of us and knowing we were to wake up at 5.00am. So after waking up half a dozen times through the night we were both seated at the breakfast table by six. The dogs have to be fed before people! So they were given their doggy roll and the lorikeets raw sugar and bread was prepared before we sat down to eat. (There is a ritual in our kitchen that cannot be changed!)

Colin waved us goodbye at seven and we were on our way with a full tank of petrol and far too many clothes, since we had been told that it was to be cold in Canberra and we need to be “prepared”.

Colleen has two bad knees so I didn’t ask her to take over the driving at any stage but we stopped for a morning tea at a roadside picnic stop and then stopped again when we reached Coffs Harbour to have a banana split at the “Big Banana”! Boy, was that good! I had strawberry topping and Colleen, Caramel and we struggled with the bendy plastic spoon and the delicious creamy banana icecream. Perhaps the customers have stolen all the real spoons – or else the staff has decided against washing spoons!

When we got back into the car I plugged in my USB memory stick with folders of music on into the car radio so from there on we were entertained with music. When Colleen nodded off I changed the music to classical and enjoyed a different style of sound.

Just as we pulled into the motel we are staying in tonight the phone rang. Colin must have telepathy – he thought we should have arrived “by now”. The woman in the reception was puzzled as to why we were taking so long to get out of the car!

 Colleen and AJ

Of course the kettle was the first thing that was checked and filled! I know my priorities!

Here we are enjoying the results of that great move!

Once I have posted this tale we shall go off in search of an evening meal. We both fancy Chinese food tonight – but we shall see.

AJ

Playing with a free program

I am an avid reader of a blog called Digital Photography School and thanks to a link provided by one of the respondents to an article I downloaded a free photo editing program called Photoscape. What a find! There are so many useful little features in this program that most people would be able to edit their photos using this program alone! It can colour correct, light correct and give some super effects too.
I am going to show a few things that can be done with this program.

This is a photo that has not been manipulated. Now lets see what can be done with a few quick clicks.

How about a reflection? Admitedly the reflection happens at the very bottom of the picture - but a bit of cropping helps the effect! (I cropped just at the trainer wheel)

This is a fun pic - this is another filter called Coloured pencil and it gives an excellent coloured drawing. If you wanted this to be just a graphite - black and white - drawing you would only need to tell the program to remove the colour and "bingo"!

Finally with the bike wheel, an effect that is called "newsprint" - the pictures in a newspaper are made up of dots. to this has been added a black inner line around the edge and a coloured border edge - white.
Now for a bit of fun with a picture of pelicans.

Not too much has been done with this photo that is clear (other than the "call-outs") but white balance and levels have been used that made a good difference to a dull picture.
After that text was added - "The Chorus line" - and I was able to move it and turn it to put it where I wanted it.
Next I chose to put a couple of "call-outs" and there were so many different shapes to chose from that I took a while to find two that I would stay with!
Next I rounded the corners and decided that I had done enough to one photo! Its easy to go too far!
I do recommend you try this fun program - it comes with links back to the video tutorials so you will never be stuck for ideas of what to do with your photos.
Have fun - I know I will!
AJ