Baltimore & Poe

I recently went to Baltimore, on what I call a "medically-induced vacation." In other words, I didn't really CHOOSE to go there, and I wasn't really there to sightsee, but I did get to spend one day, after some testing at Johns Hopkins the day before, exploring the Inner Harbor.

It also happened to be on Halloween, and we got to go to the church/cemetery where Edgar Allen Poe is buried and take a tour of the catacombs under the church, as well as hear some dramatists present some of Poe's works, including The Raven and The Tell-Tale Heart.
Halloween ranks pretty low on my list of holidays, but I must say this was an excellent way to spend the evening...it was not presented as a creepy, scary thing, but had a much greater historical/literary emphasis, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I did take pictures in the cemetery and in the catacombs, but I'm only posting one of Poe's grave, because there were just too many other beautiful things to photograph in Baltimore. This is just a small sampling; I took over 100 pictures, easily, but haven't had much time to play with them. I'll add more as I can, but even if I don't play with them, they have to be adjusted to a more web-friendly size.

Never Forget

We Remember.

Rose of Me

In the posting on Sept 4, I mentioned how random flowers have popped up in my mostly barren yard, the most recent being a Rose of Sharon (okay, I don't know my flowers all that well, and this could easily be a hibiscus rather than a true Rose of Sharon...but hibiscus doesn't have my name in it, so that's just not as cool...)

Anyway, I mentioned that I had not yet been able to get a good picture because they hadn't really bloomed out well. The very next day, of course, they were suddenly out en masse...all white, except for ONE purple bloom...crazy.

Anyway, here's a few pictures of them I've played with:

Work Artified

Since I listed things I like about my job on one of my other blogs today (The Seven), I thought I'd go ahead and post some work-related pictures on this one. The "modern day" pics are all ones I've taken and "artified" but the older pics, well, they're already art, in my opinion...and it's my blog, so my opinion is all that matters!!

The Eyes Have It

A Bonus post for the day, just because I came across this while uploading pics for the previous post, and was reminded just how much I love it!! This is one of my nieces, when she was very little.

Knoxvegas

Today's photos are just some random pictures from my hometown, or thereabouts...

Bridge at dusk, with boats below










This is a really cool little working waterwheel that serves as the entrance to a subdivision near where I grew up...it's been there ever since I was little.







Downtown skyline from across the river, done in colored pencil effect from Photoshop








We're near the Smoky mountains, an endless source of beautiful photo-ops!







The view from a nearby hiking trail

Nature Art

These are mostly pictures of flowers around my house that I've played with in Adobe Photoshop. My yard is amazing--we moved in about two years ago, and the yard is huge, but had only one misshapen Japanese magnolia, a Crepe Myrtle, and some kinda really ugly bushes along the side porch.
The first year, some tulips and ONE hyacinth came up in the front yard early in the spring. Then a few daffodils appeared, and then one morning, some sort of daylilies (I think--not really positive what they are) popped up out of nowhere around the front porch...I mean, these things really shot up...in the morning there would be nothing but a bit of stem and by the next day, they were in full bloom..incredible!!
Later in the summer, a great big area of tiger lilies appeared along the back edge of the retaining wall; I love tiger lilies, cause they're ORANGE, and I'm a Tennessee fan!

THIS spring, there were even MORE hyacinths...then came the freezing weather at Easter and everything died, including the cool fast-growing lilies which were only blades at the time, still hadn't even grown stems. Then came the first of June...and boom, there were the lilies! Don't know HOW they managed to come back from the dead like that...
Then the tiger lilies again, still beautiful. And NOW, new flowers, in the same location as the tiger lilies but coming up only as the lilies die back. We've been here nearly two years now, and this is the first time I've seen these flowers...and to top it off, I think they're Rose of Sharon...yeah, my name's Sharon. I almost bought a Rose of Sharon plant this spring, but I decided to wait. Guess I won't really need to now...
I haven't gotten a really good picture of the Rose of Sharon yet, because I haven't caught one of the blossoms at just the right point.

Anyway, here's a slide show of some nature pics--they aren't all from my yard--the heron is from a little pond near my house, the bird on the flower is from Washington, DC:

Boomsday 07 redux

Hopefully, I've finally succeeded in uploading the video--it's a very small sampling of the Boomsday fireworks in Knoxville, TN, but it gives you the idea...lots of noise, lots of smoke, lots and lots of people and pretty colors up in the sky. One of the coolest effects they do every Boomsday are the white fireworks that seem to form a "waterfall" off the bridge, but they aren't on this video because it just didn't look the same--it created so much light that on the video you just see this huge glowing area.

Boomsday 2007

Ha! I guess I should have thought about the fact that I'd want to put up Boomsday firework pictures before I made my FIRST posting of the July 4th fireworks...well, these WERE a bit more spectacular than the ones in my brother's driveway!!

Boomsday is Knoxvegas' big Labor Day celebration, which ends with massive amounts of fireworks being shot off from Volunteer Landing, along the river. It is a mass of humanity...and I'm not really a big fan of being in the middle of masses of humanity, so my kids can make me go, but they can't make me really get into the thick of things! These are from the vantage point of the Baptist Hospital parking lot, just to southeast side of the bridge where the fireworks are shot off.

I tried to put a video sampling up, but it's not working. Admittedly, I've never done it before, on blogspot anyway, so maybe I'm just missing something.
In the meantime, I'll post the "art pics" I've done.



































Okay, no more fireworks pics for a while (unless I can get the Boomsday video loaded...); tomorrow I'm moving on to some of my nature pictures, and then a cool new effect I've been playing with on my camera.

Blasting Off

Life Artified is about capturing both the special and the mundane moments of life and making them works of art...not GREAT works of art, mind you. I'm not a professional photographer, and I'm not a professional graphic designer or anything else art-related. I'm just a person who was created by God and who loves seeing the beauty in His creation.

So, let's blast this blog off with some pics from the Fourth of July. My family and some friends just gathered at my brother's house and shot off fireworks. It's hard enough to get good firework pictures at a professional fireworks show, but when it's just a few people shooting off random fireworks, it's really hard to get a good photo, because you have to try to anticipate WHEN it's going to go off, and WHERE it's gonna go.
MOST of my pictures here are of sparklers...cause they're easier to keep track of!

Sparkler Close-up

Same sparkler, doctored in Adobe with neon outlines...looks like crystals!

Some time-lapse sparkler photos

The time-lapse "S" done in colored pencil