I felt like getting away from the cutesy stuff I like to photograph (when I’m not taking pictures for my recipe blog, that is).  I also wanted an excuse to play with my macro lens.  My husband is currently doing the spare room over to make it into a nursery.  Last night he removed all the hardware from the built-in cabinets and spent a couple of hours cleaning off old paint and shellac.  Now it all looks new again.  I really wanted to grab some pictures of the hinges while they were still loose, but he was too quick for me.  I settled for snapping a few shots of the screws.  And just because screws are such a compelling subject (note sarcasm), I decided to get creative and desaturate the final image.  Black and white hardware…does it get any better?  :)

This is my cat, Seiya.  She loves nothing more than to lounge around in bed all day.  Unless, of course, she’s sitting by the radiator.  Otherwise the appeal of a fluffy down comforter is too much for her to resist.  At least it doesn’t show her fur!  In fact, she blends in so well I don’t always realize she’s there.   Luckily those beautiful, bi-colored eyes of hers made her presence quite obvious on this day.

Being that I turned 29 (again…I’ve had years of practice) yesterday, Al took me to Boston to celebrate.  I’ve never lived more than 45 minutes away from the city, but this was the first time I spent the night.  Specifically we went to Quincy Market and the North End.

It was so much fun!  We started out getting a drink at Durgin Park.  The bartender was talking our ear off about horse castration and other equally disturbing topics, so we quickly finished and went to the Union Oyster House.  That was a much better experience!  If you want the best chowder (no, I will not call it chowdah!) Boston has to offer, that’s the place to go.

After walking around and doing some shopping, we got dinner at Strega.  I don’t think I’ve ever had bad food in the North End, but Strega is by far the best I’ve had!  We only just managed to save room for dessert at Mike’s Pastry.

When we first arrived in town I left my camera in the car.  I’ve been so many times I didn’t think it was worth lugging the darn thing around.  Also, it was gray and overcast.  I didn’t think I’d be inspired to photograph much.  I immediately regretted my decision.  I tried taking a few photos with my cell phone camera, but that just didn’t cut it.  I went back for my DSLR and got a few decent shots in before I’d had enough of carrying it.  I went back for it when night fell and got a few more decent shots in.  I won’t bore you with the whole collection, but here are some of the better ones.

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Perhaps later I’ll see if any of my cell phone pics are worth sharing.  I should also take a picture of my beautiful birthday present!  We’ll see…

I was playing around with Scribbles some more.  This time I worked from a photo of Al.  I spent a little more time on the shading with this one.  It’s hard to see some of the detail in the image below, so you can click on it to see a somewhat larger version.

Okay, I’m having a little too much fun with this program.  I’ll try to talk about something a little more exciting in my next post…like what Al has in store for me.  Tomorrow is my birthday.  Check that…I just noticed it’s after midnight.  Today is my birthday then.  Al’s taking me somewhere to celebrate, but he’s given me no clue other than that it will involve an overnight stay.

I recently acquired a bunch of Mac software from MacHeist 3.  For those of you know don’t know, every year MacHeist lets you earn a bunch of free software by completing “missions” – fun, online quests they set up.  At the end of the Heist, they release of bundle of spectacular software which can be purchased at a ridiculously low price.  The mission part is over, but the bundle is still available if you’re interested.

One of the free apps was called Scribbles.  I’m no great artist or anything, but I do enjoy doodling on my white board from time to time.  So I was pretty excited to get an application like Scribbles.  One of the things you can do while drawing with it is set the window to be transparent.  It allowed me to open up a photo on my computer, open Scribbles over the photo, and trace the outline of the photo.  Then I played with the different brushes to try to make the hair look like hair and the skin look like skin.

Should I quit my day job?  No, absolutely not.  But I think it doesn’t look too bad.  Here’s the original picture and the one I did using Scribbles.