Summer Goodness

Here are a few photos from around the house and family this spring and summer.

Black swallowtails aren't nearly as shy as their tiger swallowtail cousins.



I did get some shots of a tiger swallowtail.

There were three family weddings this spring:

My niece Angela and Suhail married in New York.

My niece Sarah and Chris married in Cancun, Mexico.

And their mother Mary married Bobby in Texas after parachuting to the venue.



My nephew Daniel graduated from high school. Here my father helps him tie his tie.

I think Dad's wondering if someone who can't tie a tie is ready to graduate.




We had the nosebleed seats.



Here he is afterwards with my parents.



The grand finale to the graduation:



Back home the garden is doing better than ever.



The Virginia Creeper leaves have already turned.




That's all for today!

Susan Tuttle's Digital Layers Class

I've been taking mixed-media artist Susan Tuttle's new online class "Digital Layers."  I'm getting a late start on it, but I'm having a really good time.  I can't wait until the last lessons when we get more into collage. 

Last Sunday we went to a family wedding at Lake Lavon.  The bride and groom parachuted in (that's how they met) and it was a casual affair on the lakeshore. The Cowboy Church preacher married them.  I managed to take 397 photos while we were there.  Don't you love digital cameras? I will be working through them for a while. 

Not all the photos were of the wedding.  I also took some photos of my son having fun at the shoreline.  I took pictures of the waves, the "beach" and a tree for use as texture photos.  

Here's one of the photos I did for the week 1 project 1 of Digital Layers.  As always you can click on the photo and go to my Flickr photostream to view it, and others, in better resolution.  And you can check out the group photos for the class from a link on this photo's page.




The photo really looks better viewed in a larger size.  I used a photo of my son at the water's edge for background, and layered another photo of the waves surging over the shoreline, followed by a layer of glass texture from Texture King. Texture King has lots of really interesting free texture photos.  The originals are on the Flickr stream for comparison.
                          
I have Susan's newest book Digital Expressions:Creating Digital Art with Adobe Photoshop Elements.  After I finish the online class I'm working through the book.  The book looks great, and the projects cover some techniques that I've wanted to learn for a long time.  There's a disk included with the book but I haven't had time to look at it yet.