Keep It Simple

I may have mentioned before that I've been trying to learn Photoshop CS4 with a book that I have and recently I've been looking at the many ways to extract part of a photo. Today I approached the photo you see below with one of the most complicated but best ways to extract the flower portion so I could put it back on the black and white version and keep the original color. After a couple hours and a few tries I still was not happy, so I finally decided "to heck with it, I will just use the old Magnetic Lasso tool", not nearly as sophisticated, but guess what. . . It worked! This photo was taken with the others I posted earlier. Today happens to be Avery's 9 month birthday, but that had nothing to do with me posting this.

Mesquite Adventure

Right after breakfast these guys are about to go out into a cloudless sky at a temperature of about 98 degrees, but it is still very early, so it will get warmer quickly. So why are they smiling? Well, because they get to go golfing with me. Okay, at least they get to go golfing.

Sean

I was going through some of the photos I took on our trip to Oregon last month and I saw this one I took of Sean sitting on a little log chair by the South Falls (I think). Sean was a real sport and escorted Dustin and I clear down there and back without complaining. There must have been 500 stairs, but it was worth it. OBTW, I think he carried my tripod the entire way.

Speaking of Visitors

August is going to be a very busy month. It usually is. This Saturday is the Law Family reunion for my parents' descendants. Then on Sunday, after church we head South to Mesquite Nevada where we will spend a few days with Eric's family and Melissa's family. We will be back on Thursday and then on about Saturday Dustin and his family will be up and we'll get to spend some time with them. What a great month this is going to be! By the end of the month I will have forgotten all about the Water Heater incident. Here's a photo I took of Dustin, Tamra, Sean & Anna while we were up there just a few weeks ago when they took us to see these beautiful falls. Sean and Anna rode with us, and was so glad to spend some time with them.

Our Young Visitor

Melissa got brave one day last week and decided to go with friends to Park City. Oh, what to do with Avery? She would be bored and tired, maybe mom and dad will watch her?? You bet we would and we did. Just in case Melissa was worried about her putting up a big fuss and crying her eyes out while she was gone here are some photos.

OBTW: Let this be a warning to you. If you bring grandkids over for us to babysit you better bring some cute clothes (Like Melissa did) because they are likely to be photographed. And yes we are accepting models.

Deep

This is just a candid shot of Jeanne taken shortly after I got the new camera. I thought you ought to see it. I think she's playing a game on the computer, or she might be doing extraction on it. . . . Looks more like a game from the concentration level.

Test Post

What you are reading here is a post to the Empty Nesters' Blog. In the Google blogger program, I found where I can have each post sent to your email. I tested it out on the previous post but only had it go to Dustin and Tamra (and a copy to myself) since they are the ones who got me thinking about it in the first place. On this one I've added a photo and I'm sending out to all of my children. If you get this by email you will note at the bottom that there is a link that you can click on and it will take you to this same post on my blog. The only problem is it just takes you to this post. If you want to see what other posts have happened recently, or the entire blog, all you have to do is click on the blog header after you are in it.

If you get this and you do not want them to come by way of email just email me or leave a comment on the post and let me know. If, on the other hand, you are reading the blog and see this, and you did not get the email and would like me to add you to the list, then email me, or leave a comment, and let me know that you would like to be added. By the way, if you ask me to delete you from the email list tell me that you are reading them anyway or that you get them by RSS feed or something so that I don't cry myself to sleep thinking that you don't care what we post on our blog. Thanx! :-)

Life is So Busy

While I was up in Oregon, Tamra and Dustin both confessed that they forget to look at our Blog. Can you imagine that??? Well, that is unless we send them an email reminder telling them we have posted something. I thought that maybe there was a way to get the blogging program to do that automatically, and sure enough it looks like there is. So, this is a test to see if it sends out an email to the addresses I put in for it to send emails when I post. Let me know if you get this.

Thanks.

Finally

I told you in the last post to watch for more information and photos on our Oregon trip. So as promised here it is. The real excuse to go to Oregon was for Anna's baptism. She was so excited and so were we. It was a very nice event and I think half her ward showed up. The next day, Sunday, Anna gave a talk in Primary about her baptism. She wrote it herself and did an excellent job. We were so proud of her. She is growing up to be a fine young lady with a good strong spirit. Speaking of strong spirit, she enjoyed getting her photo taken for the event and wanted to pose just right. She set up the one with her daddy and the one out on the grass in front of the church. I just snapped the shutter. There were several others with her best friend and they had lots of fun. Dustin and Tamra have those in their computer for posterity. Jeanne and I are so glad we got to be there for this happy event.

Oregon

Well after a spring and early summer that made us wonder if we had woken up in Oregon even when we were in Utah. So, when the weather dried up and got sunny we decided to go to Oregon. Well really we had really decided some time before because we had been invited to Anna's baptism. So the time came and off we went, or maybe since we are in Oregon now, I should say off we came. We decided to make it a little bit of a leasurely trip, and since I had a new camera I wanted to test out quite a bit.















The first day just outside of Vale, Oregon I saw a house that I just had to get some photos of.

Quite a few miles later I was driving along when I looked out to the left and saw some cowboys bringing in their horses on their four wheelers. I thought that was kind of ironic and so I went back and as I did the farrier (horse shoer) pulled up. I went up to the fence and asked them if they minded if I took some shots of them working with their horses and they said they didn't mind. So I snapped a few.

That night we stayed in the town of Burns. Since we got their fairly early I asked the lady at the front desk where there were some pretty places near by to take some photos. She told me about a place only a few miles away and said that I might even see some wild horses. As we were driving up the road she told me about we saw a large group of horses right by the side of the road. It never occured to me that they might be the wild ones she had mentioned. I took quite a few photos and it was really a little later that I figured out that they might be the wild horses. It was a realy interesting herd to watch, for the short time I got to see them.

We spent the night on a miserable hard matress and woke the next moring to continue on to Albany. But on the way I wanted to see more of the beauty of Oregon.

On down the road after the city of Bend we got into some of the really beautiful part of Oregon. I pulled off onto a side road and crossed a little bridge and found a little spot where I could get some beautiful photos. As I got closer I noticed several tiny little frogs. I had to be very careful not to step on any of them. There are a bunch of them in this photo, I counted 17 of them.

After getting past all the tiny frogs I did get some photos of a beautiful area.

We finally made it to Dustin and Tamra's house.

It makes a papa proud. Well at least we also get to see Tamra and our sweet little grandchildren.

Watch for further developments - and PHOTOS!!!