Photos for Tonight's Competion::January 24

This eveing, there is a photo competition with the photo club I'm part of. I have been sick for the past week, and I'm not sure I'm going to make it, but I sent in my pics anyway. Here's hopin'!

I thought you might like to see the pics I entered.

Okay, so there are four categories: Authentic Assigned, Authentic Open, Altered Assigned, and Altered Open - Authentic is for pictures with minimal changes, just touch-ups really. Altered is anything else. We are allowed to send in two pics for each category. The assigned theme for the month is: Fresh.

So for Authentic Assigned, I chose "One Spring Day" and "Freshly Fallen Snow":

For Authentic Open, "A Girl and Her Cat" and "Snowy Cat"

This is my first time for entering the Altered category. I was nervous at how to do this, because many of the pictures I saw from last competition had drastic things done to their photos, like adding another sun or moon. I didn't want to do that, so I played around with different techniques in Photoshop and Gimp, and this is what I came up with - you can see the effects better if you enlarge these (just click on the pic):

For Altered Assigned, here is "After the Snowstorm" and "Freshly Chopped Pixel Salad":

And for Altered Open, here is "Doing What it Takes to Get a Candy Cane" and "Mother and Child"

Not nearly as drastic as adding things to the picture, but I'm hoping it works ok. For "Mother and Child" and "After the Snowstorm", I turned them into oil painings. "Doing What it Takes to Get a Candy Cane" was playing with sharpening masks and turning the sharpening up high; it reminded me of a Norman Rockwell picture. And the "Freshly Chopped Pixel Salad" is an action that I found with Gimp; it literally chops up pieces of the pic and puts it back together, pretty cool!

We interrupt this feel good post with local weather:

I just heard of freezing rain here in Utah... what the heck?! We don't have that here! So my mind is on high alert and I'm trying to decide if the worst is over, or if I better make a mad dash to the story for ready to eat food. Not to mention that I'm panicking that my kids are at school 15 miles away and Steve is at work 30 miles away. What to do, what to do....

Here are some pics of this morning's commute:
ksl.com News Photo Viewer

After that news, I will probably *not* be driving 50 miles away for a photo contest. They can send me the results via email.

I'll let you know how my pics do and how the weather turns out next time. Until then, stay warm, dry, and safe please! xoxo