Isabella's Dream

This is Isabella. She is an unlikely cross between a Great Dane, a Beagle, and some other sort of dog. Many of you have already seen her or seen me mention her from time to time. But Isabella needs your help.

You see, Isabella is in the terrible predicament of being a poor dog with a rich dog's taste. So what she needs from you is $1,000,000 in American cash. Don't worry though, it's for very unselfish reasons. She wants to have a golden dog house built for her. And she wants to eat the finest steaks money can buy.

Up until now poor old Isabella has had to live in just a normal dog hose and a nicely cushioned cage. She likes the cage the most because it's inside the house. But that golden dog house sure would come in handy, especially since she isn't allowed up on the furniture.

Isabella has this dream of being an example for all other privileged dogs. Why shouldn't she have only the finest things? After all, shouldn't her rubber chicken toy make real clucking sounds? And she should also have a bacon scented ball. That would be a lovely little perk for a dog of such royalty.

She has promised to stop chasing every bird, cat, car, and squirrel she sees if she gets what she wants. I think that won't last very long though. She has also promised to stop breaking every collar that is bought for her if she finally gets that super deluxe model that she's been waiting for.
 

But right now poor Isabella is a sad sad dog because nobody has yet been generous enough to dig a million in change out of the bottom of their pocket so she can finally be happy. I've tried to tell her not to hold her breath, but she never listens to me anyway.

And besides, who am I to tell her no? I also have to admit that I wouldn't be all that upset if a million bucks found its way to this household. It might be fun, really. And I guess everyone has to have a dream, even dogs.

My Newest Passion

I have a new passion. Of course that doesn't mean my passion for nature has lessened. My new passion compliments and enhances my passion for nature. What I have found and am enjoying so much is photo editing. The best part is that it inspires me to take the best nature pictures I can.

You've already seen some of my work in many of my other posts. I can't say that I'm great at it yet, but I'm improving. Maybe one day my stuff will be beautiful. For now I'm trying out many different little techniques.

For instance, with the picture above I tried to get a bit of a fantasy feel. I always liked the original picture, but I always imagined the scene closer to what I did with it now. Now I see it with magical creatures hiding behind every tree and bush. click on it to make it larger if you like.

The picture above is the original photo. you can see that it was a nice enough scene when I took it. I imagined it as a look into a secret fantasy world. The problem is that, like so many other good photographs I've taken, it fell just a bit short of that in my eyes. I wanted a way to capture what my imagination saw.

Have you ever had a dream of being in a far off place or maybe a fantasy land?  I think of things like that all the time. That's why I like to edit these pictures. Some of you may like to travel. A few of you may even pick up and move to your ideal place in the world. There are Apartments for sale In Turkey if that's your kind of thing.

I like different environments and times of day too. For example, I took this picture above right before a huge thunderstorm. I've always thought that it was a beautiful picture. The quality of light was special when I took the picture. The camera was able to capture that just a little too.

Honestly, after looking at the picture after resizing it for the blog, I think I like this upper one every bit as much as I like it after I did my edit. The full size picture I edited showed a more noticeable improvement. I guess that's the price I gotta pay when I'm trying to save space for this blog.

Now here's the picture after I did a little bit of editing. This technique works really well on pictures of people. I learned this one on a Gimp message board. It makes pictures look similar to the super sharp pictures that National Geographic has. When I used it on this picture, it made it so clear that I felt almost as if I could walk right into the picture.

That's about it for my talk of editing pictures this time. I haven't given up any of my other passions for this. And who knows? Maybe I'll get bored with doing a lot of this as time goes on. But maybe I'll get much better. It's just something fun to do while I'm home.

I'll be back next time with something of which I have no idea yet. How's that for an ending?