Yay Laura!!!

The pictures are just beyooooteeeeful! Those poppies are so gorgeous and delicate. I ws "Falling in Love" Shirley poppies last season and fell madly!
What is the purple to the right of the convos? Very striking.
Glad you can post your photos, looking forward to seeing more!

Shore

Yay Laura!!!

The pictures are just beyooooteeeeful! Those poppies are so gorgeous and delicate. I ws "Falling in Love" Shirley poppies last season and fell madly!
What is the purple to the right of the convos? Very striking.
Glad you can post your photos, looking forward to seeing more!

Shore

Yay Laura!!!

The pictures are just beyooooteeeeful! Those poppies are so gorgeous and delicate. I ws "Falling in Love" Shirley poppies last season and fell madly!
What is the purple to the right of the convos? Very striking.
Glad you can post your photos, looking forward to seeing more!

Shore

Yay Laura!!!

The pictures are just beyooooteeeeful! Those poppies are so gorgeous and delicate. I ws "Falling in Love" Shirley poppies last season and fell madly!
What is the purple to the right of the convos? Very striking.
Glad you can post your photos, looking forward to seeing more!

Shore

Here is a link that might be useful: shore's photos

Laura, you did good!
What are the pretty blue and white flowers,with the yellow dot?
Very nice indeed.Can you show us some more?
cAROL

Thanks cAROL,

the flower is a convolvulus. I can't pronounce or spell it, so I call them convos. very easy to winter sow too.

:)Laura

convolvulus ensign. They are available at Lowe's here, there's also a red. It's in the morning glory family. Spectacular flower.

So we'll be seeing more pictures now, right? :)

Ahhhhhhhh, I thought it looked like a mornig glory,does it vine?
cAROL

can't stop me now. lol.
here's one of my purple chicken coop garden.

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this one of my compost piles.
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here's spazz, being bad.
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I can't wait till Spring.
:)Laura

Wonderful photos! I'm jealous. I haven't mastered the art of posting photos yet. I have to get more computer savy.

That was a nice story in photos. Good job! Does photobucket give you a choice of a little smaller photo that isn't 1024X768, like not so wide? It scrolls horizontally off my 17" monitor screen.

Sometimes I get one posted that is too wide, too, but try to keep them 900 px wide maximum.

Be that as it may, I enjoyed your before and after pics and beautiful flowers, and that's what really counts.

I just get so excited when people post pictures of their garden. Your flowers are lovely!!! I'm going to take more pics this year and then enjoy them all winter. I posted a video of my garden before it was at its peak on YouTube. I watched it the other day and it really chased away the winter blues.

aliska,
I really don't know what I'm doing.lol How do you change the size? I don't even know why the first picture is smaller.
I'd much rather post them smaller so they fit my screen. I mean they're nice and colorful and I'm proud of myself for actually doing it without one of my kids helping. But yeah, they are too big.

babcia,
find a teenager, and bribe them to help you. I couldn't get passed photo buckets without help.

cAROL,
no, they don't vine. They sprawl, so they look nice in containers.

Thanks so much for all the great comments.

:) Laura

Awwww i just love your pics! Your cat is so cute( and a birdies nightmare!) Is that convertible yours? I would love one of those!! lol And i envy your compost pile. I got a composter for christmas, cant wait to load it up!

I LOVE the Pink Poppies! So jealous! I'm going to WS poppies for the first time this year (red ones) wish me luck! Nice job with the pics.

Thanks everyone!

No, that's not my car. It's my oldest son's. I drive a mom mobile. lol
But I'll tell him you like it. He loves that thing.
:) Laura

Laura, I crop my photos whatever size I want in Photoshop. It takes awhile to learn how to use a photo editor, but that is one option if you have any photo software that might have come with your camera or something. GIMP and Irfanview are free, never tried them, no need. Paint Shop Pro is fairly cheap and more powerful now than you'll ever need for just photos. Maybe someone will have a good suggestion or the exact right answer.

Otherwise, I'd look on Photobucket and see if it gives you options for different sizes. I do have an account at flickr, and it gives me a choice of 3 sizes, small, medium and large. Then it gives me the code to copy and paste in depending on my choice. But I hardly ever use my flickr account but my own site, and if I do upload photos to flickr, they're already cropped to no more than 900 wide; height isn't a big issue.

Depending on how the photo is, sometimes I just resize in in Photoshop (PS) using the percentage method and keep the box checked for maintaining the aspect ratio. If I crop, I normally use either 900X600 72 dpi (not too often, keeps the aspect ratio), 800X600 (good but sometimes can't get all I want in there but useful for getting rid of parts I don't want) and sometimes 640X480 when detail isn't too important.

For portrait mode, you have to reverse the numbers, of course. My camera's output is 3:2 aspect ratio.

Your one with the cat is 170.31 KB which isn't too bad for a photo that large. Usually I try to keep mine under 100 KB but sometimes I let it go a little over that up to 135 or so, don't know how many still have dialup any more. Most here probably have high speed now.

I went to the test forum, and breenthumb taught me this.
{{gwi:357449}}
this is my stream garden/drain ditch. It doesn't look like much now but I'm W.Sowing lots of plants. next time I post this garden, you won't recognize it. Well, if I can get Token to do it for me. lol

:)Laura

great job!!

I love the chicken coop bed!!

Hey the compost is pretty too!

Now we expect more pics when your ws gardens bloom :)
Karen

Delightful!!

Looks like she's ordered from Annie's annuals..beautiful!

Thank you so much! How cheery it is to see your flowers. You have a beautiful garden - and a cutie kitty too!

Thanks everyone!
Here's the next pic after Spazz tried to get the babies.
Papa bird attacked and Spazz high tailed it. lol She was just fine.
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click on it to enlarge.

(the mom mobile is in the grass).
I need to level that post! It's in a half whiskey barrel and every year it settles worse and worse. lol.

Thanks again for all the great comments!

:) Laura

Laura, now you know how to do something I don't know how to do, make an image a link. I have it bookmarked where to get the code for it. I prefer embedded photos because I'd rather not have to go external links for photos and have to use the back button and pass over things sometimes because of it. If I'm really curious, I WILL click on it.

Let's try this.

Nevermind. I see why you had to do that. It said 59% in the upper lefthand corner so you or a photobucket feature allowed you to resize it and display it THERE at 59% of the actual size. But when I copied the link and tried to embed that same photo here, it was that large size again, so will skip it and call it a day on that. You have made progress anyhow!

Your photos are really nice, I think that little blue flower with a white eye is a nemophilia, have some seeds to plant later of that, IIRC it's an annual.

If you want some advice on how to take that poppy photo better with your camera, I can tell you what to try. It's got a lot of white on the petals which means it blew highlights (camera meter couldn't handle that bright of sunlight that day and washed out [blew] some of the pink color). But I'll wait to see what you say about that. I have to watch talking too much about camera stuff and may have already risked insulting you.

Maybe your camera, Kodak Easyshare M340 doesn't have a setting for what I can suggest. Yes, your camera has it. I looked up the specs at dpreview.

I'm no expert, but I don't know where I'd be if people hadn't given me useful tips along the way.

I did find this at photobucket on how to control the size of your photo.

Here is a link that might be useful: Photobucket image size, scroll down to Images in the righthand pane

Maybe the pink poppy has some white in it. Does it? Or is it all pink?

I LOVE poppies, WS'ed a lot of different ones. And one more kind coming soon I hope.

wonderful pics, such abundance. It made me think of annie's annuals too with that gorgeous nemesia.
I did convulvulvus last year and will do it again but sow heavily this time. Mine didn't bush up so much as spindle. Very worth it though.
I think you cat and my cat would get along. I can't even have bird houses, seed or a bird bath because he would get them all.
Great job with the pics. Would love to see more. hooray for winter sowing.

Thanks everyone!,

Shore, that's a larkspur. I think It got stunted when I transplanted it.

aliska, I'm not insulted at all. I appreciate the help but...err I have to admit I have no idea what you're talking about.lol I'm a clueless, dinosaur when it comes to tech stuff.
I still can't figure out how you know what camera I have. Wait, don't tell me because I won't understand the explanation.:)
:)Laura

Laura, yes you might understand, and I'll be so bold as to attempt an explanation. Certain data is "embedded" in your photos where you can't see it and always stays with the original photo if a digital camera was used. It remains with photos you've manipulated in some way depending on how you save it and depending on the site hosting your photo. I always leave mine in, no particular reason when I post on the web.

There is an easy add-on to Firefox to view image exif data, if it is present. Photobucket is being cranky right now, so I can't access it for all of them but some. It was working last night.

If you have the add-on, all you do is right click on a photo and choose "view image exif data". Firefox retrieves it from the host server and tells me all sorts of things if it is there. There is also an add-on for IE8. To get it for Safari was more complicated, but there's one for that, too.

The main reason I use it is not to snoop but either to try to help people or when I see a photo that I know requires experience and skill, if it is present, I like to know the camera make and model, shutter speed, aperture, focal length, program, metering mode, exposure compensation if used, because it gives me ideas of techniques to try.

Even if you don't have the add-on, and even if it doesn't show on the web (most news photos never have it, it gets destroyed for web viewing if you save certain ways), when I open any original photos or photos using "save as" for .jpg of mine in Photoshop, no matter what camera I had at the time, the data is there for me to study and remember what settings I used. It even tells me which lens I used usually but won't tell me that if on the web, just the lens focal length.

I bet I made that too complicated, but think it over, and it may start to make sense.

aliska!,

OMG I studied what you wrote over, and over, and over, and over, And guess what???? I'm starting to get it!!
Thank you for not giving up on me. lol

"there's a big difference between being silly, and stupid."
I tell my kids that a lot.
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lets see how this size looks.

:)Laura

Laura, you are one quick study!!! Perfectimundo!!!

Now what I was going to suggest, and you can try it on something that doesn't count sometime. All of your photos are well exposed except I'm not sure about the poppy one.

When the sun is that bright, between 10 to 2, try to find in your camera settings on the camera or in the menu a way to change EV or exposure compensation. On bright, sunny days, especially with white and light colored flowers, they tend to wash out or "blow".

So to help with that, set the EV to either -2/3 or -1. See how it works for you. Don't forget to set it back when you're done with that session. Been there, done that! That is what I wanted to explain intially and got off on that tangent.

And, yes, to this day, when I go to set the EV, I can never remember which button on my camera; it's on the cam, not buried in the menu.

Since you're such a quick study, I'm going to 'splain one more thing people taught me. There are what are called two "golden" hours during the day for taking photos and not getting shadows on faces, when the lighting is best, etc., blah blah. They are one hour after sunrise and one hour before sunset.

But rules are meant to be broken, and I take them any old time I feel like it and adjust my camera settings and fill flash accordingly. But that is for another time.

I have to read some things 10 and more times sometimes. Goes with the territory. If I'm persistent, it may come to me a couple days later.

Keep up the good work. What a beautiful garden! That's what really counts!

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE your compost pile!!!

aliska,
my brains cooked for today. I do see what you mean about the sun washing a picture. like this one of my comppost.
I picked this one for you glad2garden.
Thanks for the comment. I love them too.
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:) Laura

Heavenly! This one should be on the compost forum. They would love it! Victoria

I'm sorry I threw you into overload, my brains get fried, too. That is such a pretty and tidy way to hide your compost area.

The reason you got that effect in the compost example is that it looks like you were shooting into the sun but it was the best vantage point to capture it, so maybe another time of day with the sun at your back and try to stand soas to keep your own shadow out of it?

You have covered a lot of territory, really don't have anything more to offer except maybe turn off the date showing on the photo? It's stored with the picture where you can't see it but wouldn't be lost.

My daughter did that, and one turned up special; somebody wanted a print, so I managed to straighten, make some minor adjustments, then had to clone all of that date out of there which isn't so easy. I certainly don't mean this to be critical as all the rest of it is so wonderful, cat spooked was funny!