The old collage try

I'm slow to change things.  The simple color theme on this Blogger page is a classic example. 

It has been a couple of years since I had done the collage of Adobe Illustrator-generated pysanky that I used as my iPhone lock screen.  After hunting down images for my latest Easter basket attempt, I thought I'd also update the collage.

I had to play editor and leave out a few favorites because they just didn't go well in this arrangement.   Though the individual eggs are done in Illustrator, it was not computationally feasible to try an arrangement.  PhotoShop to the rescue.  I added a little neutral gradient shadow effect near the base of the eggs, and I added a lighting effect coming from the top-left.  The background gradient is a Blue 1 from the photographic gradient palette.

So, here are my eggs of 2013, rendered for the iPhone 4 screen of 640 by 960 px.

Basket-O-Trouble

It's a pisser when you lose some of your favorite graphics files.  I had created an Easter basket with pysanky a couple of years ago using a combination of Adobe Illustrator and PhotoShop.  When I recently got around to swap in some of my newer eggs, however, I discovered that the only thing that I had was an empty basket -- literally.  The candles were gone, too.  I had to start all over with gathering and arranging my eggs in the Easter basket.

Here I am, starting all over again.  Got some new eggs in a somewhat pleasing arrangement.  Now I have to re-learn the art of candlemaking and futz some more with the cloth (rushnyk) arrangement.

Ringing in the Sheaves

This yet another attempt at re-working a previous design, which is based on a Bucovinian motif that I saw in the Flickr Easter Eggs group.  Although not as colorful as many of my other efforts, I'm pretty happy with this rendering of the pseudo-grain sheaves. 

Ringing in the Sheaves

Getting around that time of year again

... when an Adobe Illustrator obsessive's fancy turns to pysanky.  These are based on some Bucovinian designs I found in the Easter Eggs group on Flick.

Orange Jewelweed

[Gack!  Blogger slipped a few cogs and relocated a post from sometime in summer 2012 to this date.  No idea how to fix it.]

Meet the Orange Jewelweed (Impatiens capensis), a.k.a., Common Jewelweed, Spotted Jewelweed, Spotted Touch-me-not, or Orange Balsam.  There's a yellow version of this plant -- Yellow Jewelweed (Impatiens pallida)-- that I did not realize is a different species. It commonly grows in bottomland soils, ditches, and along creeks.

According to the venerable Wikipedia,  this member of the impatience family is North American native.  If you're near water, you can see how the plant might have gotten its jewelweed name by immersing a leaf under water -- it appears shiny silver.

It gets its "Touch-me-not" name from the fact that its seed pods "explode" on contact.

Mug shots of the Orange Jewelweed, showing a face-on view and in profile:

Touching up in Camera Raw

I decided to apply some of the PhotoShop techniques that I've recently learned to some favorite old pictures.  My latest exercise involved a reprocessing of a photo I took with my old Canon XSi and the EF-S 18-55mm kit lens.

It was the evening before with winter solstice in 2009.  The clock on Woodburn Hall read 5:25 p.m.   WVU students were on break, and a fresh snow had recently fallen, leaving the grounds around the downtown campus relatively pristine.

Following tips in Scott Kelby's "The Adobe Photoshop CS6 book (for digital photographers)," I worked directly in Adobe Camera Raw, spot-touching the clipped highlights (shown in red below) around all of the lights.  I then took on the clipped shadows (shown in violet below), which were predominantly among the bushes in the foreground as well as in the trees around the building.

After correcting the exposure in Camera Raw, I finished the touch-up work in PhotoShop, correcting the barrel distortion on Chitwood Hall, to the right of Woodburn.  I removed a little "noise" from some of the dark areas on the building, too.

I really liked those old lights.

Always look on the dark side of life

If you want proof that life is perverse, take the results of a recent study published by the American Psychological Association.  The paper (PDF link), "Psychology and Aging --  Forecasting Life Satisfaction Across Adulthood: Benefits of Seeing a Dark Future?" says that optimistic older adults face a greater risk of disabilities and death.

According to lead author, Frieder R. Lang, PhD, of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.

"Pessimism about the future may encourage people to live more carefully, taking health and safety precautions."

Because a darker outlook on the future is often more realistic, older adults' predictions of their future satisfaction may be more accurate, according to the study. In contrast, the youngest group had the sunniest outlook while the middle-aged adults made the most accurate predictions, but became more pessimistic over time.