Puckish Posters of Pretty Phenomena

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Make a poster out of a favorite picture. You can make a fast and easy "poster" using the Motivator online application here -- just upload or link to the photo you want to use, and then type in your text. Any photo is game. However, as I've highlighted the Motivator before (although not in a Photo Shoot), don't recycle the posters you may have made before.

You know I didn't do just one of them, don't you?

I realize that many of you folks like flowers a lot. They are a favorite photographic subject for quite a few of the Robins, some of whom do outstanding work capturing the subtleties of a single perfect bloom, sometimes whilst said bloom is being visited by some photogenic creature.

Myself, though, I just don't like flowers, and this expresses why. It's self-defense, mostly. I am allergic to many things, and flowers are about halfway up that list. One flower might not be so bad, as long as I keep my distance, but who plants just one flower? Here, to illustrate the point, is a flowerbed outside my office building. The image was an odd shape, so I did some pasting and cloning to fill it out. The original shot is of a traffic berm between two walkways, hundreds of feet long, filled with flowers.



I had a surprisingly hard time executing this second one, considering I've probably taken a few hundred sunset photos over the past 26 months. Most of them have a landscape orientation, and I wanted a portrait shaped image, big enough for the poster-making engine to make something with a decent resolution. My favorite sunset shots are among the first digital sunset photos I ever took, up on Mount Lemmon with saguaros in them. But they were only 375 pixels wide, and looked terrible when I uploaded them. The large versions are on a CD somewhere.

*****

Today my friend at work loaned me a recent issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and when I headed home this evening I happened to toss it on the car seat face down. When I got home, I was surprised to see a familiar name and image on the magazine's back cover:

My current reading - and the F&SF back cover

Heh, heh, heh. It is, of course, the book I'm reading now. My main hook as both a reader and a writer is characterization, and this book again has John Perry, a character I like a lot despite my previous musings about his not being a "damaged" person. It must be said, though, that aside from the character, aside from the banter, the strength of this book so far is the surprising twists and turns the plot keeps taking. (No spoilers this time, Paul.) Well done!

Karen