A Dreamy Fantasy Pathway

I want to share something I've been doing on my computer recently. My pal Rob Wayne over at Nature Center Magazine has been messing with different photo editing software, and he lets me know about some of the things he tries out. So I decided to start playing around with some of that stuff a bit myself.

The scene above shows the entranceway at Five Ridge Prairie Preserve. I took the picture from the inside while I was leaving. The original picture is nothing special. You can see it below. I take some pictures just to mark my place. But I learned a little technique to turn my ordinary picture into a dreamy fantasy scene.

I won't bore you with the details. I just thought it was a nice little effect. I was doing similar things before, but I have more control over things with this new way. It's kind of fun playing around with my photos like this. It gives the computer nerd in me some needed excitement.

You can see by the second picture that the two are very different. Go ahead and click on them if you'd like to compare the two. Neither is great art, but the work was fun. And the hike there was just as fun. I always say that a person should have many different interests. It's even better if you can combine a few that are really very different. I'm glad to be able to combine my love of nature with my love of computers. What kinds of things do you love where you can do this? Who knows? Maybe you can influence the rest of us.

Oh, by the way, the photo editor I used is called Gimp. It's free, and a simple Google search will find it for you. I won't say too much more because I think Rob was planning on writing a whole article about it one of these times. I just thought I'd share a bit of fun.