Textures and courage.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." Anais Nin

I plucked that quote right off of Flossy-p's blog (I love her art, blog, and nick name. Man, I wish I had a cool nick name like Flossy P. Hmmmm... maybe Jammin J or Lady J or Shaka Laka Mama?????? Or not. Moving on.) I was already going to post this picture and write about my new Photoshop discovery of textures, but when I read Flossy's blog today, I thought the quote expressed what this picture means to me. So, if you don't mind, I'm going to veer off just a bit from the original post and then I'll come back to textures.

I love this picture in so many ways. I love my daughter. I love the beach. I love the positioning of her feet. I love the innocents I feel when I look at the photo. I love that she didn't care about who was watching her on the beach as she danced and sang along the shoreline. I love how metaphorically the photo depicts that with one's own courage, life can be as vast and deep as the sea. Wow! That felt good =)

Alright, back on track. As I mentioned earlier, I discovered the magic of textures over the weekend. By textures, I am referring to certain filters or layers that can be added to a photo via photoshop or possibly some other photo editing software. The textures can make a photo look vintage, worn, grungy, or pop some color in a pic. I've known about textures for a little while, but I've been hesitant to play around with them because.... well... they cost money. So, over the weekend I was bumping around some blogs and came across Pixie Blossoms blog which had some great photography tutorials. The tutorials led me to a couple of free textures that are currently available on flickr. Below are some examples of what textures can do to a photo.

This is the original photo...

and here is the textured version (again)...

I like it =)

I used a texture called pollution (click here).

Here's another example of a texture effect. The first photo is not textured....

and here is the texture version....

I like both pics. (I took this pic on Sunday at the Charger football game. As it is already written in the flickr description,.... "The heavens opened up and the Chargers won by one point." There! That's my quote. Inspirational... yes???) Anyways, I used this texture (click here) for the above pic. If you don't know how to apply textures, no worries. I found a great tutorial right here. When I was playing around with the various textures, I found that I didn't like to texture my portrait pics, or at least not yet. If you know of any other texture sites or advice, please do share the love.

Jamie