Wishing all my dear family and friends a Happy Baha’i New Year!
As I’ve been experimenting with photoshop and learning how to use it lately (thanks Jarome), I wanted to share one of the first experiments with you. I so enjoy combining my passion for photography and love of inspirational quotations and I look forward to sharing more. You’re most welcome to download them and use them however you wish.
As you may have guessed from some of my blogs, I love photography. I also enjoy finding spiritual and inspirational quotations so I wanted to find a way to combine the two. For the first time today I experimented with photoshop to see if I could incorporate one of my favorite quotes in a photo I took recently. If you study the photo, you’ll find a few things about me that you may not have known before. One is that I love details so naturally I enjoy taking close-ups of nature and flowers in particular. I also love matching colors! I had such fun finding the right shade of purple for the words in the quotation to match the photograph (I’m amazed at the array of colors to choose from). I’m also a bit of a perfectionist (finding the right font and playing around with the size and layout to create the perfect balance was such a pleasure).
I look forward to exploring photoshop further and figuring out some of the more advanced features. I will be sharing photos and quotes more often as I figure out how to use this powerful tool. Let me know if you have any tips and how you like the photo/quote combo. And if you have any favorite quotes, please share them.
A few days ago, I took some friends from Ireland and a relative from Kenya for a little site-seeing in Beijing. We visited the Forbidden City which was the Chinese imperial palace and the largest ancient palatial structure in the world. For almost five centuries, it served as the home of the emperor as well as his household.
For those of you who haven’t been there, it’s truly hard to describe except to say that it is massive. It consists of 90 palaces and courtyards, 980 buildings and 8,704 rooms! What struck me more than the large expanse of space with so many buildings was the names that were given to each of them – ‘Gate of Supreme Harmony’, ‘Hall of Earthly Tranquility’, Gate of Heavenly Purity’, ‘Palace of Tranquil Longevity’. I was delighted to see how peaceful and harmonious the names are and wondered how those names were chosen for the buildings.
Here are some photos I took of our visit. Most of the shots are close-ups of details that caught my eye like door-knobs of large red doors and beautifully painted roof-tops with colors of gold, blue, green and red. Enjoy!
Photography is another passion of mine that I have neglected recently. I have been using small digital cameras for a long time and feel frustrated by the quality and results of the photos. For awhile I’ve been daydreaming about owning a more professional camera to take better quality photos. Yesterday I felt it was time to upgrade so I bought a new camera! :)
Today I had a lot of fun taking photos and experimenting with it. I especially enjoy taking macro shots which are close-ups of objects and nature. I will need to read the manual and study in more detail how to use this camera but that will take some time. Meanwhile, here are a few photos of my first day of experimenting. I look forward to sharing photos more frequently on the blog.
