Focus on You

Glorious green!  Thank you Larraine Zungolo for your submission this week.  

Be sure to check out Larraine's flickr stream 

Crayola Happiness

By Cathy

"Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air – explode softly – and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth – boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn’t go cheap, either – not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination."   ~ Robert Fulghum

Green Loveliness

by Dotti

Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises.

                                                                                        ~ Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Spanish writer

Instructions for Life

by Kelly

Instructions for living a life.  Pay attention.  Be astonished.  Tell about it.  ~Mary Oliver

Green, Green

by Terri

"Green, green, it's green they say

On the far side of the hill.

Green, green, I'm goin' away
To where the grass is greener still.”

~The New Christy Minstrels

The color we're focusing on this week is green. Green is everywhere! It’s the most common color in the natural world, and it’s second only to blue as the most common favorite color.   It’s the color we associate with money, the environment, and aliens, and it’s the color of revitalization and rebirth. 

 

And lest you think there is no green in the desert, this beautiful Queen Victoria Agave is thriving right here in Arizona. It is my very favorite agave with its lush green and white markings.

Post your green images in the FOL Flickr gallery this week and let us see the green you find in your world!

Shades of Gr..?

by Linda

hah! Caught you looking!

I bet you were thinking about that book that my daughter won't let me read! So I don't know what all the fuss is about. (fingers crossed behind back)

While you get your mind out of the gutter, (I'll wait), this is really going to be about shades of color. Specifically, green.

As a child, I was pretty much a pure color kid. I always wanted the biggest box of crayons but only used about 4. The three primary colors because the sky was BLUE, the sun was YELLOW and RED was my favorite color, and always the shortest crayon in my box. (I have since matured and moved on from red, sadly my mother did not think purple was an appropriate color to paint my room, but I doubt if she would have liked red any better) If I wanted to color grass, it was GREEN.

There was always all these "other" colors in the box with weird names. As well as lots of colors with mixed up names like blueish green and my particular thorn in my side spring green.

Spring green. What is that? I would often try to use it but it always looked too yellow. My grass looked like it was dying a slow death in the heat of summer. Who made up this color? It was terrible. But I couldn't leave it alone. I kept trying to use it on something.

Then I grew up. Suddenly a whole new world of color exploded before my eyes. Every color changed and became something close to what I remember but a completely new experience. A feast for my eyes. I felt like I must have been color blind my entire life because now, seemingly everywhere I turned, a new shade of a familiar color revealed itself!

I found spring green! And I love it! It is a yellow-green and it is much more than just a color. It has become a sign of growth and new life and hope that is spring.

I love it!

..

But purple is still my favorite color.

..

Focus on Phoneography

We have so enjoyed the theme this month and love seeing all of your gloriously green images. From muted and pale to vibrant and bold, the #focusingonlife pool has been overflowing with the color of life. here is just a sample of the beauty this week: 
@saurand @aalmadr @jan_twoscoopz
@mommadmalone @limez @aroseisuppose 
@_timelessnchic_ @marl1een @tasselflower 
Be sure to check the blog for next month's theme. And thank you all so much for continuing to share your beautiful art with us. We are so grateful for you!

When Size Matters

by Linda

 

 

Printing our pictures is one of the more satisfying parts of this whole photographic experience. Whether you are scrapbooking, framing, selling or giving, holding the pictures in your hands and viewing them in the real world and not just on the computer can give you a sense of pride and accomplishment in what you have created. And I hope you are printing them. Even the ones on your phone.

The little cameras on our phones have come a long way. The one on my current phone takes pictures with amazing clarity. We all know how important image size is when it comes time to print our pictures and sometimes you might wonder if the pictures on your phone are big enough to print clearly. They probably are in most cases, unless you cropped it or used an app that degrades the pixels.

It's easy to see how cropping will reduce pixels, you chopped them off! There are some apps that will degrade the pixels of your picture just by adding the effect that you went there for in the first place, whether you crop it or not. You take a perfectly good picture and you want to run it through a favorite app and that favorite app will spit out a reduced pixel image. Why is that? I have no idea! (if you do please explain this to us in the comments)

So how do you know if your picture is big enough? There is a handy app called "Photosize" that will tell you. (for iPhone) It's sole purpose in life is for you to put a picture in it and it will tell you how many pixels wide and how many pixels tall and what the total pixels are.  That's all it does. After it has shown you the pixels of that picture, it simply asks for another.

This is useful information, but what do you do if you have a picture that is too small? One way I resize/resample a picture is with another app called "Filterstorm". (for iPhone, coming soon to Android) This is a good app with a lot of other uses, when saving a picture you get the option to tell it what size to save the picture and at what resolution. (try Photo Resizer for Android)

I cropped the above picture to show the pixel degradation from the cropping then I ran it through Filterstorm and show the resize/resample size.

After cropping -

You can see the total pixels are reduced by more than half.

After resizing/resampling in Filterstorm, there are mega pixels! Over achiever! I input 3000 pixels wide and 3000 pixels tall which is bigger than the actual image and I input maximum image quality so that is why I got so many pixels.

If you're interested in converting total pixels to megabytes, there are way too many variables to explain, compression ratios, ppi's, calibrations, whether it's Tuesday and so on, so rather than give you a headache, let me just say, try to save your pictures at the highest resolution possible. If you have to resize/resample, start with width and height of 3000 pixels each. This way you will be sure to get your pictures printed at the size you want, and they will look mah-velous!

...

 



Focus on Phoneography

Oh, so much beautiful green in the gallery! Here are just a few. 

Top: @mommadmalone @dianabrandmeyer @melissakraft

Bottom: @mhplinda @_timelessnchic_ @kellykardos

Keep those green photos coming!

  

Focus on Phoneography

Oh what a lovely gallery you have created! If you need to see a little green, be sure to stop by!

Row 1- @saurand @moatezbkilani @anniestril
Row 2- @mommadmalone @zuzu365 @aalmadr
Row 3- @kellykardos @hellomrsk @maryelizar

...

Focus on You

It's not easy being green but Cheryl McCain has aced it with this fabulous low key photo. Called 'Organic Matters', it is full of wonderful organic textures and that green philodendron peeping out of the corner. Beautifully done, Cheryl!

You can see more of Cheryl's work on her Flickr photostream.

Thank you so much, Cheryl, for sharing your art with us this week.

Remember, the color green is our inspiration for the whole month. We look forward to seeing your green beauty on our Flickr page.

It's not that easy

by Kim

. . . being green. 

- Kermit

"Kermit"

My inspiration for today . . . Sesame Street, and my dear friend Kermit the frog.

Kermit says it's not that easy being green. That it's not easy having to spend everyday the color of the leaves. He thinks it would be nicer being red, or yellow or gold, or something much more colorful like that.

He feels like it's not easy being green because you blend in with so many other ordinary things and that people pass you by when you don't stand out like sparkly diamonds dancing on water.

But he doesn't know how cool he is . . . being green and all.

Because green IS the color of Spring, and hope and of things to come.

And one of my very favorite things about spring is the new green growth, the renewal, and re-birth of all things that have laid dormant over the winter months.

Green is the color of balance and harmony, and is all about vitality and restoration of our senses.

There is something very tender and spiritual for me about spending time in nature, where there is truth to be found, a vulnerability to be experienced.

Living in and among nature is what gives me the strength to cope with the adversities of this life and it's what has gotten me through some really difficult times. And there are so many lessons about life to observe and learn when we take the time. Nature has so much to teach us, but we must be willing to look beneath the surface. To pay attention, to engage.

"Love Abounds in All things Green"

What I want Kermit to know, is that green is anything but ordinary. It's the color of cucumbers, apples and broccoli. The color of leaping lizards and lily pads, and of the beautiful monarch chrysalis. The color of ferns and evergreen trees, of cactus, parrots, and praying mantis.

Green is the color of sustainability and of our future. It is the color of nurturing and of life. It's the color of chlorophyll, the pigment rich in enzymes and antioxidants and critical in photosynthesis. Green IS energy.

Green is the foundation of the forest, and it IS the color of nature. All we need to do is open our front door.

Green IS, extraordinary!

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves

of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something

infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature - the assurance

that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."

-  Rachel Carson

Wishing you all a green kind of day,

Love, Kim

Combat NDD

by Carol

I've been asked to spread the word. Are you aware that there is a malaise effecting our world?  It's one that effects our spirit and heart, and then plays out in our bodies. It has been linked to obesity, depression and ADD. I have seen and sensed it, but I didn't know it had a name. And I didn't know that some of my favorite people are involved in finding a cure.

NDD is Nature Deficit Disorder, and I am a big believer that it is real. I have written before about Louis Schwatrzberg, and I know that many of you love him and his "Moving Art" projects as much as I do. But I got a bit behind in reading his blog, and it was only this morning that I found his posts discussing this. The growth of our cities and our constantly increasing need to be busy, and important and more wealthy, more fit, more famous, more More, has led us away from our down time. Many people don't take the time anymore to look, to walk, to hear and connect with nature. And when we fail to take that time, it effects our stress level, and adds to our growing anxiety. When we ignore taking care of our planet, we also ignore taking care of ourselves. Are you restless, or sad? Are you scared or tired? Or are you just trying to find a meaningful existence?

Obviously, Mr Schwartzberg's work makes nature more accessible, and helps people to fall in love with it, but I wasn't aware until this morning that he is actively combating NDD with his process "Visual Healing." After reading Richard Louv's book, Last Child in the Woods (which I have just ordered), he as set out on a mission to put nature back where it belongs - which is everywhere! He uses visual stimuli, but as an audiologist, I know that auditory stimuli are important too, for total immersion. It is well known that part of the psychology of deafness is feeling isolated from the world when you are unable to hear something as seemingly inconsequential as the fall leaves crunching under your feet, the dragonflies buzzing, the dampened sound waves of a quiet snowstorm. One of my most moving moments as an audiologist came when a patient's daughter wrote me a thank you note as she quietly watched her mother sitting on the porch listening to the rain with her new hearing aid.

So I, for one,  am going to join Louis Schwartzberg in his efforts.  He is asking us to use any media we can - Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc to post NATURE pictures and/or NATURE selfies with the hashtag #BeatNDD. He will highlight some from time to time, but that is not why I want to get in on it. I am a true believer that nature heals. I have been told that my photography tends to highlight quiet, and that is because quiet heals me. There is nothing I love more than standing in the woods and drinking it in. I know I am preaching to the choir on this site. I think our mission
here ties right in with Visual Healing. This is just another way for us to contribute. I can't wait!

And BTW - welcome to March, and our new Focus On You Month theme (which happens to tie right on into this post)  - GREEN! See Deanna's blurb above, and bring the green that we are all hungry for to our gallery this month. Don't forget to add # , so that you might be featured one Saturday morning. Our month of picturing LOVE has come to an end - but I think we all are posting love everyday! Keep up the good work!

Glorious Green

"Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises."

~Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Do you find yourself drawn to one color over another?  Have you ever looked through your photo catalog and find a common thread of color woven throughout?  That color for me is green.  After seeing the prevalence of green in my photos I decided to do some research on what that might say about me.  

Green is the color of balance and harmony….yep that makes total sense.  Those are two things I'm constantly striving for in my life.  Delving deeper into color psychology I found out that "green is the balancer of the heart and the emotions, it creates an equilibrium between the head and the heart."  

Color for me plays a big part in everything we do. Various colors bring forth different emotions.  Green is the color of growth and the color most associated with Spring, the time of renewal.  It is a de-stresser.  You can look at shades of green and instantly feel calmer and more at peace.  

What colors do you see most often when looking through your viewfinder?  Do a little research and see what that says about you!