The new Blog Header, with appreciation to Gogo and Mr. Whybrow

Ever since cute blonde Gogo changed her blog header I had been thinking that I needed to do one rather than just have plain text.  I had been meaning to do it, just never got around to it.  I am, after all, quite a lazy blogger.

But I was taking some pictures today, at my new home, some cheesecake ones to tell the truth.  I decided to try to get a formal style portrait for the downstairs.  I did get some pictures I thought were fairly well done, specifically this one:

I liked it so much, because it "exemplifies Ms. CC" , so I quickly cropped it down to make a new profile picture.

However, my friend Mr. Whybrow of Caledon said it was dark and could use some lightening up.  I had taken it using a non-fixed region windlight because the lighting was good only a few minutes before....it had gotten darker, and this pic looked even darker in the profile.  He suggested I try again with prim lighting... but I don't do that, don't usually need to because I'm running around with a fixed time windlight....but not this time.

But I liked the picture so I normalized it up in the GIMP and used THAT.  Then I realized that might make a good blog header.  Played around with it until I realized it would work best with some text on it, so I added some BodoniXT in The GIMP.  That got my header.

So Kudos to Gogo and Mr. Whybrow...and my new EVGA GT640 Rev 2. (that's the recent Superclocked GDDR5 version not the 2012 version) video card, which let me actually MOVE (with a low 15fps) with ambient occlusion, full shadows and depth of field on.  And not crash a few minutes after turning them off again.  In fact I've turned them on and off 3 times.

Mrs. Lanley portrait

I was watching the ISC group chat and reading Mrs. Lanley's words and decided to take a visit. Like most oldbies I know how to find people, figured she was on her home region puttering around and she was. (I've been there before). She welcomed the company and we chatted as she showed me some of her favorite bits like the new dock she put in, which was nice. Well anyway she was just standing there, and there was somthing about her that made me want to take a photo. (I asked Mrs. Lanley's permission to blog and post photos) So I did my thing and got a few nice ones


This was the first, she was just standing there and I thought the water would make a good picture. I did a quick change to sunrise:



The next is of us together. After I showed it to her she laughed about how much taller she was than me. (We also played around with shape settings a bit later, which was fun.)



Now I wanted to get a photo of myself on the dock, so I turned up the settings, this has shadows and depth of field turned on:



And since I know Mrs. Lanley doesn't have good hardware I wanted a lovely portrait style photo to give her so I did this one with the Paris 2 windlight setting, shadows and depth of field on. Very lovely:



And yes, that's the Icing Joan I'm wearing. And yes, I have it in ALL the colors. It's Icing...It references Joan Holloway...what do you expect.