07/23/12 - Window at Marbles My Blog: http://maryanng.blogspot.com/2012/07/window-at-marbles.html The kids and I went to Marbles Kids Museum yesterday. As we walked up the stairs, the light coming through the big skylight caught my eye. SmugMug Link We had a picnic on their patio and then went inside. I love the kids having fun in the submarine pretending to be marine biologists (lower right). I really want to put Madi surfing on the fountain (shot lower left in the collage and the following shot). Maybe sometime:-) SmugMug Link HAGD, Maryann

Thanks for stopping by to view my daily photo! I will post a new photo each day to this gallery. Typically, I will post early morning, and the photo will have been taken the day before. Sometimes the photo may be from sometime earlier in the week, but all the pictures posted will be relatively new. I hope you see something that makes you smile. Feel free to leave professionally appropriate comments.

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07/30/12 - Mystery Dragon

My Blog: http://maryanng.blogspot.com/2012/07/mystery-dragon.html

First let me start off by wishing Johnny a happy 8th birthday today!  We celebrated last night because today is the first day of the boys' new school year (year round), and I felt it would be too hectic to celebrate today.  He's into Pokemon and likes Wall-E and received a few gifts on those themes.  I made organic brownies, and we each had just one.  It was the first sweet in over 3 months.  Interesting how the kids accepted that it was a real treat instead of just one more sweet in the long list of sweets.  Progress!  I had trouble uploading the brownie/singing happy birthday video. I'll share tomorrow.  Here's one picture of him with his brownie.

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My daily is a dragonfly picture that I took Saturday.  I cost me 6 mosquito bites, so I had to post it.  I've never seen this variety before, and after spending 30 minutes trying to ID it, I still don't have one.  I posted to BugGuide.  If I hear back I'll update this text. OK, it's a Blue-Faced Meadowhawk.

The hummers are back in full force at my house.  The light is always so low in my yard:-(  I snapped this picture just out the kitchen window anyway.  Darn stick in the way...  Female rebuy throated as far as I know.

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HAGD,
Maryann

07/29/12 - Butterfly Beauty

My Blog: http://maryanng.blogspot.com/2012/07/butterfly-beauty.html

Donnie and I went to Wilkerson Farms yesterday to buy some more grass fed beef.  As I've said before, Carrie has an excellent butterfly garden out front of zinnias and coneflower.  There were at least 5 swallowtails fluttering around plus a bunch of smaller butterflies too.  I call it butterfly heaven.  So, besides buying the meat, I went crazy with my camera taking pics in her front garden.  Thanks, Carrie, for letting me take these pics!

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I also put out a blog yesterday on purging processed foods from my pantry if you're interested:
http://maryanng.blogspot.com/2012/07/processed-food-purge.html

HAGD,
Maryann

07/28/12 - Juvenile Male Cardinal

My Blog: http://maryanng.blogspot.com/2012/07/male-juvenile-cardinal.html

I watched the father cardinal feed this male juvenile 'baby' for a few minutes while I was preparing dinner last night.  I can always hear their distinctive chirp, chirp when they come to the feeder and birdbath.  I missed the daddy putting the sunflower seed in the baby's mouth but was able to capture this pose of the baby on the birdbath.

Monday is back to school for the boys, and we've been school supply shopping!  In our state and our county, we are asked if not required to buy quite a long and expensive list of supplies to send in with the kids.  This is most of of the stuff for Johnny who is entering second grade.  Although there are some variations from teacher to teacher and grade to grade, the bulk of the lists is the same featuring items both for the student's private use as well as some items for use by all the kids (i.e. plastic bags and baby wipes).

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Grouper from Haag & Sons Seafood.

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HAGD,
Maryann

07/27/12 - Robot Warriors

My Blog: http://maryanng.blogspot.com/2012/07/robot-warriors.html

These robots are from the Lego game Robo Champs. I bought it some time ago and decided to open it for Johnny today. He loves robots! He built them all on his own following the instructions and proudly presented them to me when he was done. I decided a photo shoot was in order:-) I tweaked the original quite a bit to give it a bit more of a futuristic if not realistic look. Johnny was quite pleased with the finished picture and framing.

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HAGD,
Maryann

07/26/12 - Omlette Anyone?

My Blog: http://maryanng.blogspot.com/2012/07/omlette-anyone.html

Donnie made breakfast yesterday. Look at that omlette he made Johnny! Mushrooms sauteed in butter and then folded on top one egg with Wisconsin cheddar cheese and some Canadian Bacon and a strip of real bacon too. Yum!  Donnie recently got us this de Buyer Blue Steel Crepe Pan from Williams and Sonoma. We read the reviews saying that it works well on eggs, and it does.  Specifically, the 24cm works great on 1 or 2 eggs.  Donnie found 3 eggs at a time to be a bit too much.  We eat eggs everyday now.  Such a great nutritional food wrongly avoided for cholestoral in our opinion.  And, our eggs come from a local source not the grocery store.  The eggs vary in size and color and are ever so yummy!

Four days and counting until the boys start their next school year.  In the meantime on these hot summer days we've continued to teach the boys card games.  Yesterday we added Spoons.  What a hilarious game!  We had a blast!  Donnie shared some happy memories of playing this game as a child with his brother.  He said sometimes at Thanksgiving there would be 13 spoons on the table making it easier to sneak 1 or more out of the pile without anyone noticing.  The most complex game we've taught them is Rummey.  We're running out of new games to teach them that are kid friendly.  They keep asking us to look up Trash.

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I also captured this American Lady butterfly on my lantana at the mailbox.

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I did not have time to ID the dragonfly from yesterday. There are several other shots and views in my July gallery that might help. If I have time:-) It was an extra large dragonfly. Thanks for your supportive comments.

HAGD,
Maryann

07/25/12 - Big Dragonfly

My Blog: http://maryanng.blogspot.com/2012/07/big-dragonfly.html

We had a hot and soupy day at the house yetserday followed up by another round of severe afternoon thunderstorms.  Thankfully this time we weren't driving in it this time.  There was power out all over Raleigh, a tree down on the I440 beltline, and cars off in the ditches.  I had lots of small and some larger limbs to pick up in my yard on Blaze's doggie walk this AM.  I'm just glad it wasn't worse.

Before the storm, the humidity had the dragonflies out in force in my yard circling my ornamental ponds.  I finally went out to take a few pics not long before the first rain came, so there was cloud cover already...boo.   I tried to take shots with my Canon S3 IS which at ISO 100 has little noise, but there just wasn't enough light to get the shot I wanted so I switched to the Canon SX40 HS and took some shots at the lowest ISO I could and still get a fast enough shutter speed to not get hand held motion blur.  The ISO ranged from 100 - 1600.  The top shot was taken with a flash and at a -2 flash output setting.  I resorted to the flash to try to get rid of noise.  The bottom shot was no flash.  I had to do a lot of stuff to get the top shot where I was happy enough with it though.  It was originally way too dark.  Maybe I should have done a -1 on the flash.  Next time!  I added some contrast in Color Efex Pro, but it still didn't satisfy me.  I added a light green Vignette in Picasa, but then the outermost wings were covered.  So I used the select tool in PSE7 to capture the wings from the non vignette image and then put them as a layer over the vignetted one.  But then the face bothered me.  I lost details adjusting the contrast because that area had the most light colored part of the shot.  So I selected the face off the original exposure and layered it over the vignetted layer too.  I also removed a minor white spot on the lower right wing.  I dunno.  It's OK and I think an improvement over the ogirinal but I still much prefer other dragon shots I've taken over the past 3 years.  Still, it's the best of what I have from yesterday to share today:-)  When the light isn't right, you sure do have to do a lot of work to fix an image...sigh.  Even in the one below I've had to do a basic contrast adjust in Picasa to bring out the color tones. 

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Thanks for your comment on my storm cloud shot from yesterday.

HAGD,
Maryann

07/24/12 - Storm Cloud

My Blog: http://maryanng.blogspot.com/2012/07/storm-cloud.html

A picture of a storm cloud taken on our way home from a grocery shopping trip yesterday.  I liked how the rain appeared to be coming down out of the cloud.  Most of the storm was past by the time I took this image.  Boy was I glad Donnie was driving.  The rain and sky were quite intense for parts of our trip.  I measured 3 inches in the rain gauge at least over the last 5 days. I used Color Efex Pro to enhance the details ont he shot. I used Noiseware to remove noise.  I did an hdr version, and I pulled out a few details from the hdr image layered on top of the Color Efex Pro image to add a few more details (whitest area of picture).  I also cropped to 8X10 and adjusted the curve int he grass with the clone tool.  Not my best shot or best pp work but am improvement over the original I think.

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HAGD,
Maryann

07/22/12 - Swimming with the Sea Turtle!

My Blog: http://maryanng.blogspot.com/2012/07/swimming-with-sea-turtle.html

I picked a shot from our vacation last week to pp for today's shot.  Johnny is on the left and Joey is looking back at you delighted that the sea turtle is 'swimming' with him.  There is one sea turtle in the huge 'shark' tank, and she loves to swim with folks at the glass.  We were told that they remove her to the diver's cage a couple of times a day to feed her separately because her diet is veggies vs. the 'meats' that the other fish in the tank eat.  She sure did delight the kids.

Yesterday we went bowling yesterday with new neighbor and friend Andy.  A good time was had by all!  We won't talk about the scores;-)

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I removed a couple of lights showing up in the glass and ran a noise filter on this.

HAGD,
Maryann

07/23/12 - Window at Marbles

My Blog: http://maryanng.blogspot.com/2012/07/window-at-marbles.html

The kids and I went to Marbles Kids Museum yesterday. As we walked up the stairs, the light coming through the big skylight caught my eye.

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We had a picnic on their patio and then went inside. I love the kids having fun in the submarine pretending to be marine biologists (lower right).

I really want to put Madi surfing on the fountain (shot lower left in the collage and the following shot). Maybe sometime:-)

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HAGD,
Maryann

SmugMug Link We had a picnic on their patio and then went inside. I love the kids having fun in the submarine pretending to be marine biologists (lower right). I really want to put Madi surfing on the fountain (shot lower left in the collage and the following shot). Maybe sometime:-) SmugMug Link HAGD, Maryann" href="javascript:openLB(1982228530,'',XLarge,'',993,768);">