So I saw an spark opportunity on socialspark that I have taken with my old blog “Wanderer Thoughts” but decided to take again with my new blog.  This opportunity is to post some of my favorite photo’s, so I decided to post some of my earliest photo’s taken with my Canon Digital Rebel XT Camera.  I was just learning to use the various modes and macro settings, and I am really pleased with these 2 flower shots which are two of my favorite.

I love how the camera lens captures the flower petals with such clarity they almost look like velvet that you can reach out and touch.  I have always wanted to buy a telephoto lens for my Digital Rebel XT, but never could scrape up the amount of money it takes for some really fine telephoto lenses.  So I am using my default lens that came with the camera, but it does a fine job.

So here are two of my favorite photo’s, it is the texture and vibrant colors that stand out so greatly to me.  These are pictures of two plants in our yard, one is a rose bush and the other purple flower I can’t even remember what it is:

Thanks to Photoblog for posting this opportunity on socialspark, it was fun to post and write about these photo’s.

I have been using various painting and art programs over the years for digital photography touch ups, or simple banners, logo’s and posters that I create for various events and reasons.  One of the simplest and easiest to use programs that is also Freeware, is called “Paint.NET“.

This program has enormous amount of functionality for a freeware program and is very similar to Paint Shop Pro 8 in its ease of use and style.  Thought not quite as powerful as Adobe Photoshop, it has a much easier learning curve and flexible tools to get the job done.

Its use of layers is very convenient, my only issues are I can’t seem to find the ability to re-select and move around text after dropping it on the image.  I also wish it had more shapes for drawing tools than square, rectangle, circle and oval.  It has a freehand shape tool which is very very nice, but sometimes I want simple star’s, or hexagons or other shapes which I can’t easily create.

The tool has nice effect’s such as blurring, sharpen, ink, pencil…etc  Which can produce a variety of enhancements on images.  Some examples of what I was able to do with this paint program is take a photograph of my latest tattoo, and digitally alter it to become a logo for my DragonBlogger account.

Here are what I have accomplished with Paint.NET

Here is the original Tattoo

Here is my logo:

Here is also a Pencil Sketch conversion just to show what Paint.NET can do.