Just 1 quick picture today. I went to a picnic on Saturday, and a bunch of friends started a baseball game.  The skies were so dramatic, I just had to capture a shot of the game underneath the incredible sky!

This past weekend, I finally had a chance to get away from the routine of every day life and go camping! It was a very relaxing trip. It rained on Saturday, but a couple of in-house geniuses set up a tarp over the fire just before it started raining, which made it so we could all sit around the fire all day in complete dryness! Aside from a mild complication of my cotton sleeping bag touching the side of the tent in the rain, and therefore soaking the bottom foot, it was otherwise a very nice camping trip! I came back relaxed and ready to attack my week! Here are a few shots I took.  Of course, the pictures are a little heavy on the adorable Rowdy, but he’s just so adorable I couldn’t help myself!

When we pulled up to the campsite!

The Jore Fam, getting ready to relax.

Rowdy had such a blast on this trip, even though at times he got himself stuck!

Another dog on the trip with us, Mini!

Noemi and Kobe

I found these little colored dots in many places growing all over the leaves. They certainly were beautiful, although I don’t know if it was healthy for the tree or not.

We found time to play some volleyball, and after the game Brad and Pablo tried to play a little “soccer volleyball!”

Pablo enjoying the fire!

The weekend before last I spent some time with my friends while I was in Cloquet, MN, and we headed out to a nearby state park, Jay Cooke State Park. My friends made sure to tell me to pronounce Cooke “cookie.” Were they teasing me? Probably, but how do I know?

We had a lot of fun!  We followed a small stream up a long ways and found some very interesting waterfalls and fascinating rocks that had been eroded by hundreds of years of steady water flow. We also found a set of walls going up a hill that we weren’t able to figure out? Who knows! This first shot is one of my favorite pictures from the trip.

This is us walking up the riverbed just enjoying ourselves, looking for interesting rocks and little waterfalls.

We found these old stone walls. They weren’t part of a building, as they were every so often about every 20 feet all the way up a hill.  Maybe bridge supports? We just don’t know! We did know they were old. One of the pictures you can see a tree growing off the top of the stones! It didn’t even have any soil and the tree looked several years old!

Megan and Tiffy found a log balanced on little hump and found that they were able to use it as a seesaw.  None of us could believe that it worked as well as it did.  Here they are having fun!

We found some honeysuckle growing along the river.  I had never had it before! It was very sweet and delicious!

I ran across this hilarious list while browsing today.  Apparently, Kelloggs has seen fit to create a product called “Lego Fun Snacks.”

An annoyed parent had this to say: “I just spent the first three years of my son’s life trying to get him not to eat blocks, and now you’re telling him they taste like strawberries.”

The comedy geniuses at Woot.com have created a list of the next products the geniuses of Lego Fun Snacks are likely to create next:

1. This Bag Is Not Not A Toy: the plastic bag with candy coating on the inside!
2. Need A Ride?: the board game where you make new friends and get into their cars!
3. Zooper Zapper: the panel that lights up and plays cool sounds when you stick metal things in its little slots!
4. Gummi Mr. Yuk!
5. Retina Spy: the sunglasses that reveal secret messages when you stare directly at the sun!
6. AntiFreeezz: the neon green high-sugar energy drink!
7. Get The Lead In candy paint chips!
8. The Scorchin’ Organ: the toy piano shaped like a stove, with keys that look like heat coils!
9. The Candy Pharmacist play set!
10. Ye Olde MatchTowne: the toy village where every citizen looks like a match!
11. Caliber Creamer: the toy gun that dispenses whipped cream!
12. NASCAR Racing Scissors: the faster you run, the bigger the fun!

Ha! credit Woot Blog.

This past weekend, I spent an afternoon out at my friend Laina’s place! I had to visit her when I found out she had just gotten a pet raccoon! She found her cat outside playing with something, and she found a brand new baby raccoon, so young its eyes hadn’t even opened. She adopted it! Her other pets get along great with it, the dog even snuggles up with it! He is a curious little guy, and so cute! When you rub his neck, he chatters/purrs. And he kept climbing up us.  Another thing I thought was cool is that raccoons don’t have “paws.” They almost have hands! He had 5 separate toes, and would splay them open as he tried to climb!

Matt must have been hungry! He kept trying to catch a chicken! He failed miserably, they are fast when they want to be!

Shanrell didn’t have too much success either!

Last night, my brother came over to visit me.  He has a woodworking business, Krema Designs, and he is trying to get started and get his name out there right now, so I was helping him work on some promotional materials in Photoshop.  Then he says to me, “Hey, you should quit playing with this toy and go out into the living room and play with your new toy.” I was confused, as I really haven’t bought anything recently.  He tells me again to go out into the living room, so I do and find this beautiful hardwood chessboard on my coffee table! I was ecstatic!

He made it completely by hand, made of maple and oak! He wanted to give it to me for the help I have given him in starting his business! I wouldn’t have accepted money, but this? Oh yeah, you know I’ll take this.

Really, it’s pretty amazing. The pictures don’t do it justice at all! He is now working on 2 exotic wood chessboards for a show he has next weekend. I can’t wait to see them! 

Not much going on this week, so I thought I would post a few fun photos I got at the rehearsal for Casey and Linsey’s wedding last week! Enjoy!

While at the rehearsal dinner, I let a couple young friends of mine play with my camera. I did make them wear the strap around their necks, but looking back, I wonder at my bravery in letting 2 kids under 10 play with my camera.  But when I got my camera back, I found a whole bunch of hilarious pictures! Here they are!




Maybe I should let kids play with my camera more often. Or not. But these pictures are pretty great.

So my friends Casey and Linsey are getting married on Saturday! It’s coming up fast, and they are starting to feel the stress of having to get everything done! Linsey wanted to make an announcement for family members that weren’t able to come to the wedding, so she planned to get together with me last Saturday to get it done. Friday, Casey and I hung out and Casey decided we should design a hideous joke announcement and then play it up that Linsey didn’t need to come over any more because the announcement was all done. We attempted to make it as hideous as possible! We had Linsey believing it was done, of course, until she saw it!

She called us back laughing pretty hard!  Strangely enough, she actually had me print out a 4 x 6 of this to put on her fridge. Go figure!

On a side note, when Linsey came over to show me how she wanted her announcement to look, and we looked through the RAW camera files, we came across this shot! Just goes to show, I need to be more careful in what I am deciding not to edit. Once I finished this up for her, it was one of her favorite shots!

I’ll have pictures of Casey and Linsey’s wedding hopefully Sunday or Monday night! Check back!

OK, every time I think that I am starting to really learn the art of Photoshop and post-editing, I learn something new from one of the pros I follow that blows my mind! I’ve had Photoshop for a while now, but wonder how much I’ve really cracked into this software! Today I learned about layer masks and how to use them effectively, as well as various actions in Photoshop that can really make your colors pop off the screen. If you’re a seasoned pro in the ways of Photoshop, this might seem a little amateurish, but we were all here once, right?

One of my frustrations in trying to make certain colors pop in Photoshop is that it almost always had annoying side effects to other elements in the picture.  Make the sky bluer, and you also made the person’s eyes look unnatural and that blue car popped out too.  You could cut out the sky and make a new layer, but that was a ton of work and generally not worth it.  Try to bring out the red in those flowers the bride is holding, and anything orange started bleeding! But with layer masks, I can make changes to colors, and then choose specific parts of the picture that receive those enhancements...without having to cut them out manually! The gradient tool also makes more sense to me now, and I can gradually have an effect begin in a certain place and get more intense at the edge!

I decided to use a photo from my vacation to Honduras as my test picture to test out my new knowledge of layer masks. The first shot is directly out of my camera.  The second is perfectly what I envisioned when I imagined this shot at the time it was taken.  I was able to give the sky a richer blue and was able to make the people in the chair more silhouetted like I originally meant. And instead of it taking the hour I thought it would, and thus not being worth the edit, it took me less than 2 minutes! I am excited to see how this affects my processing work from now on!

You know those signs that read, “SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY?” I’ve often found myself wondering why such slow children are allowed to play in the street!

Today though, while out and about, I passed kind of a rundown trailer court, and I found a very different sign. “10 MPH CHILDREN AT PLAY!” I can understand why you would need to be careful. Children moving at 10 mph could easily run out in front of you before you see them.  By the way, 10 mph works out to a 6-minute mile.  Impressive. Very impressive.