Sunday, July 30, 2006

Moon plants and Life Changes

No, moon plants and life changes have nothing in common except that they're both subjects in tonights post.

Moon Plants. My mother always grows these plants on her porch and they grow prolifically. The odd thing about them is that they have these very large, beautiful blossoms that only appear at night. I've tried to grow these before with absolutely no success but this summer we finally scored. I've included both pictures above just so you can see how much this plant has grown since around the end of May. And now, tonight, it's going to display around 8 to 10 large white blossoms. They'll stay open all night long and be gone by around 7:30am.

Life Changes. If anyone read the comments in my May entry called Envy you might have noticed that I said that I was overwhelmed at work. I also said that I was drowning and just needed a lifeline but just couldn't seem to find one. Well, when I finally did realize that things were never going to change for me at work I decided to change my situation another way. I quit my job and have gone on to better things. At the moment there is very little stress and the atmosphere is totally different from where I was before. Oh, I know that things will get busy and there will be stressful days. But for the moment I am quite enjoying the change although I have to say that there are a few people at the old job that I do miss. Monroe, Ladonna, Joe, Alan, Diana, and a couple of others have been good friends and I hope that we can all stay in touch

Photo Friday: Portrait

It's been a while since I posted anything for Photo Friday and when I saw this weeks' subject PORTRAIT I immediately thought of this shot that I created a few months ago. I've updated it and added the frame and a neato optical illusion. I suggest looking at it full size for the best effect.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Terragen


I've been playing with the Terragen freeware program a bit and created the pictures below. You can almost get photo realism but I think that this is probably dependent on available memory during the rendering process. I have a gigabyte of ram and the rendering process takes almost 3 minutes for an 800 x 600 picture with realism set at 99%. The pictures below are basically the same setting with variations in sun position. In the extreme right I changed the viewpoint just ever so slightly.
Now, if I can just figure out how to add grass, plants, and trees!

Sunday, July 09, 2006

Illustration Friday: Skyline


My post for this week's Illustration Friday subject which is SKYLINE. This is a collage consisting of a photo of the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga combined with a landscape that I created with a great freeware program called Terragen.