Rose Colored Glasses

I just love the instgram world. The fuzzy warm world of instagram is just so much more serene than our plain old regular world, ain't it? Even the mess around me looks better in #valencia or #hudson. What do you say?

Just Busy...

I have been so caught up with life these days. It seems like snatching myself away even for a few minutes is impossible. I usually blogged when my boys took a nap, but lately they aren't the only ones napping around here :)
Some days I take upon the luxury of snoozing along by their side. On other days, I'm up nesting. I have an urge to get the house in order. This might be because of reasons other than the coming baby. I'm expecting house guests soon and they include my Mother-in-Law, who is flying down to help me with my two little chimps:)

On a completely different note, I am excited, absolutely thrilled, over the moon about this-

:)

You can see my entry for "Urban" if you scroll down a bit.

Below is my entry for this week. The theme is "Animal Kingdom". I caught this handsome guy at a 17th century market fair that we went to a couple of weeks ago and decided to do a "portrait edit" for him:).

And yes, I would love to do a portrait for your poultry too:)

Here is the original picture. 

I used GIMP to add a black texture in the background that I got from ShadowHouse Creations
Then I opened it in Photoscape
and adjusted the exposure, gamma bright.
I played around a little more with saturation and hue. OK, I'm sure you can tell that really don't remember the steps so accurately.  Sorry about that. I did this a week ago and just didn't remember to jot it down.

Hop over to Karli's blog and check out other great edits:)

Color Splash Sunday

This week, the theme for color splash sunday was "your choice". I had this picture that I edited last week and I thought it would be a perfect time to share it:.

Urban

This week's Yellow House Challenge is hosted by Ashley from Ramblings and Photos.
In that honor I thought I'd share a series of photos from my albums. 

New York, New York!

On a side walk in Orlando

Somewhere in DC

From over the Hudson River

From the Empire State Building

Somewhere in New York City

Times Square, through the sunroof

 

Streets of DC

I think this suits the theme the most. Nothing can be more urban than Times Square.

The last one is linked to Yellow House Photo Challenge.

Prickly Or Smooth?

Last week I decided to enter a photo for Macro-Friday on Laura's blog. I had so much fun with the macro-shot that I clicked another one for this week. I went to her blog to post my link and found out that I had been picked as the winner!!
 A big THANK YOU to Kalri from Bonnie5 for picking me as the winner for lasr weeks macro-friday.
Now here is this weeks entry.

Can anyone guess what it is?

More From The Botanical Garden

Why Did I think

That I would have this kind of  trouble

Only with a girl.

 Well, so much for that thought.
.
And, that color.

Touch-Up Tuesday

I got a chance to go to a botanical garden last week. It was a lot of fun with the kids in tow. The three of us had a great time. I got this shot while I was there.

This is edit # 1

It's pretty simple. I opened it in Picasa (that is where all the photos that come out of the camera are usually stored)
- Tuned the lights, highlights and shadows
- Adjusted the color temperature to the warmer side
- Applied soft focus


This next one is an experiment and I think it came out pretty OK. I got inspired by some drastic editing *my own term but, you know what I mean:)* that I saw and was urged to try it out. Tell me what you think of it!

Now let's see if I can remember what I did. I used Photoscape for this
-  I reduced the hue to -25
-  Reduced the saturation to -43
- Increased the brightness and contrast
- I applied the photoscape diagonal-line texture
- Lastly, I chose the Note02 frame.

I Like That One!

Jewelry at the Fair

Macro- Friday

My sons love finding bugs and I love photographing them, we make a great team!

Expecting Mommy

Now that I'm out of the closet with this pregnancy I can breath openly on my blog. It wasn't like I could hide it forever. Someday, the closet would have become very cramped for my growing belly.

So here are few fun facts
-  I'm officially 23 weeks today. I know your eyes are wide open right now, I guess it is a slightly late announcement.
-  It's a SINGLE baby. We had to get used to that fact that there is  "only" one this time.
-  Yes, I do have a belly. I like it better than a small baby bump. Atleast now I don't get urged to give explanations to strangers that I didn't have too much lunch.
-  Yes. we know the gender, it's a g...b..., I think I'll save that for later! I'll let you guys guess a bit on this one:) Yeah, I know I'm cruel like that.
- Recent craving, dark chocolate

Ryad And Nael Have Been...

waiting...

...and pondering

and thinking hard about the right time to tell you all...

                                                                
                                                                                                              ...that


                                                                                       They are going to be Big Brothers!!!!

                                      

Can you believe it?! We couldn't when we heard and after the initial "surprise" phase we are ready to welcome a new one into our family with arms wide open! I'll shed the details over the following posts.

Fix-It Friday

This will be my first Fix-It Friday attempt. I think the picture given this week has so much potential and I'm excited to show you what I did with it! Do take some time to give me your honest feedback, I would really appreciate it:)

Here goes..

The original-

I opened it in Picasa. I tuned the brightness, highlights and shadows till I saw what I liked, added some warmth, some glow and a vignette. Then I took it over to Photoscape and added the circular frame and this is what I got -

Edit # 1

Edit # 2

I brightened it and increased highlights by a wee bit. I opened this one in Gimp and used SracthBox4 layer at 60% opacity.

Eidt # 3

This one was a new experiment. Although I have to say it turned out interestingly different from what I was achieving to do. I opened it in Photocsape to lower the saturation, brightness and color. Then I decreased the backlight by 40%, added middle bloom, added a vignette and finished off by adding a circular frame!