Dec

3

Giveaway Roundup!

Filed Under Contests | 1 Comment

The giveaways and contests on other blogs are coming fast and furious these days.

Here are some of my favorites right now:
Alpaca Farmgirl is giving away TONS of stuff! Some of my favorites are a Williams-Sonoma gift card, a baby blanket made from Alpaca fleece, a super cute Alpaca scarf and a hay bale bag. More people need to offer hay bale bags are giveaways!

Diana has a great Avon giveaway. That’s a pretty impressive prize pack!

At Common Sense with Money, you can win a flip camera. These things look so cool!

Sarah from My Charmed Life is giving away a pretty cool necklace. I love the design, and the black and white colors can go with just about anything.

At Get Palmd, you can win a set of earrings (of your choice) from the Etsy shop of JuliaA. I love those hermatite cube earrings.

Over at “Deal”ectible Mommies, you can win a $100 gift card to Home Depot! And if THAT’s not good enough, you can win the same thing at Bargain Briana’s Blog.

Very neat purse by Marie-Madeline Studio is being given away at Thrifty & Chic Mom. I’ve been looking for a grey bag, and this one is definitely cool!

My sisters love their Keens, so I’m sure they will love this one… win a pair of Keen shoes at The P’s in a Pod.
I’ll be posting more of these, no doubt. And twittering (tweeting? I can never remember…) about them, too, no doubt!

Jan

12

Contest Results (for real this time)

Filed Under Contests, horses, tennessee walkers | 1 Comment

The contest is over! I must confess, it was a contest designed to have no winner. These are all edits I have done on prints I’ve sold, and my desire is for them to look like part of the picture. I just happened to use all of you as my watchdogs to point out any slip-ups where the editing had changed from subtle to obvious.

Before:

After:

In this picture, the horse’s ears were both back. The owner requested that that be changed, so I obliged. It’s considered to be a pretty basic edit for equine photographers, but one for which they charge big bucks. I did it for free so that if I screwed up horribly and the owner hated it, I could say something like, “You get what you pay for!” before running away to Mexico.

I also took out some power lines above the horse.  That part was easy.

Before:

After:

This was by far the easiest edit. Someone was resting their hand on this horse’s neck and I removed it. The simplicity of the background made this edit super quick and painless.

Before:

After:

This one was a bit tough. The shot above is the original picture. In order to get both the horse and rider in the picture for a 4×6″ print, I needed extra room to the left (that’s the black space you see in the “before” picture). Obviously, extending the barn would be a lot easier than trying to extend the horse on the other side.

There’s nothing like getting ready to make a print and finding out that you need an extra inch of picture that doesn’t exist. Usually when this happens I make a sound like “Mmeemmph!” because I’m sobbing into my pillow.

Before:

After:

Another joyful experience is pulling up a picture to make a print and finding out that it’s corrupted (thanks to a faulty CD to which it was burned before I got my trusty external hard drive). In order to fix this one, I had to cut off the bottom of the original picture and use the bottom portion of the proof that was posted on my website. Not only did that picture have a watermark on it, it was also made up of much fewer pixels. The print was 1200 x 1800 pixels and the proof on the site was 450 x 600 pixels.

That means when that proof was expanded to fit onto the larger scale of the print, it was extremely grainy. So I had to use it as a guide as to the color and shading of the horse, and pull the actual fur texture from the print portion of the horse and draw it over the proof portion. That was a lot of fun, let me tell you.

The closest one to winning in this contest was Lil. Her prize is one of my diet Cokes with Splenda that she drank last week. I hope you enjoyed it, Lil!

Jan

10

Find the Photoshop

Filed Under Contests | 3 Comments

If you can tell me how these photos were edited (and each has a fairly significant edit — not just simple color adjustments or something like that), you will win a prize!

Don’t mention the fact the faces and signature are blurred out, because you will win a negative prize (meaning I will hunt you down and take a prize from you for myself) if you do that.

Nov

21

Giving Thanks

Filed Under Contests | Comments Off

The winner of my first ever Guess What the Heck We’re Doing Contest is none other than my sister Marissa. In an alarming display of contest domination, she swept in with the first comment and confidently declared that we were making goat’s milk soap. How did she know?! It’s almost like she had some kind of insider information! It’s almost like I stopped at her house on the way home a couple weekends ago and had a conversation with her about our goat’s milk soap project, and then just kind of assumed she would be gracious enough not to guess on a contest where she had an unfair advantage!

As her prize, Marissa will be receiving a bar of homemade goat’s milk soap from our Ag Practicum group. I can’t guarantee that it will be excellent soap, but I can guarantee that (I think that) it (probably) won’t burn your face off (entirely).

Ag Practicum is a class where students divide into groups and do projects to produce and market ag-related projects. Our group chose to make goat’s milk soap, and we’ve been struggling to find a good recipe. The first batch ended up burned, and smelled like someone lit a dead goat on fire and poured it into a little soap mold. It also had strange blue spots in it, which is weird because not only is the color of the soap a creamy yellowish color, but we had added tan dye to the mix.

Our second batch refused to thicken. We stirred it for over an hour, hoping that it would begin to trace (where you drizzle the soap onto itself and it doesn’t immediately sink back in, but rather has the consistency of honey). We eventually gave up and poured it into the mold. We came back to find that the soap never thickened, and was a buttery consistency. The pink dye had migrated to the top half of the pan, with the bottom part being a dark tan color.

Last Wednesday, we gathered in the classroom building of our university farm (which has a kitchen) and tried out two new recipes, complete with two new dyes. We made both recipes at the same time, and as the final stirring commenced, we remained skeptical. Nearly thirty minutes later, one of them started to trace.

“It’s TRACING!” shouted one of my group members. We all ran to gather around it, taking pictures and celebrating.

I ran out the door and up the rickety stairs to the bell tower of our university farm. I leaped onto the the thick rope hanging from the bell and used every ounce of my strength to pull it down, making the bell tip back and forth to sound the alarm.

“It’s TRAAAAAAAAAAACCCCIIINNGGG!” I yelled, and the townspeople began to run from their homes to gather around the classroom building. We celebrated by dancing around a maypole and slaughtering a sheep and someone brought deviled eggs, but they were gone within, like, fifteen minutes.

And that, my friends, is the history of Thanksgiving.

Nov

15

Guess What the Heck We’re Doing

Filed Under Contests | 4 Comments

And win a prize! Really! The prize will probably be a couple months off, but it’ll totally be here eventually! I’ll mail it to you and everything. I know exactly what it’ll be, but I can’t tell you because it’s a surprise prize.

I don’t think the contest is all that hard, really. So I guess I’ll take multiple winners. Maybe one for the first right answer, one for most creative answer, etc. I don’t know, I really haven’t thought this through… No cheating, though. I’ll totally find out and keep your prizes all to myself.

Rain does not approve.

Reply to this post with your guesses. Entries will close at…sometime in the next day, probably. Unless nobody guesses, in which case they’ll just stay open.