Monday was World Vegetarian Day.  The assignment was to make a photo that celebrates the holiday.

This photo is the embodiment of my discovery of Aviary.  And what a beautiful thing it is!!!  I had a blast learning to use Aviary, and I love the results.  I really felt that the fakeness of the colors of these mystery veggies from UMW’s Eagle’s Next were what made them so odd in appearance, so I played with saturation and sharpness and shadows a bit (in addition to cropping and rotating the original shot I took, among other things), to really help bring out the colors of this dish.  Nothing like a horrific serving of ‘veggies’ to make you appreciate the real thing!! Yay for veggie day!

Thursday‘s was fun.  From memory, draw the floor plan of the house you grew up in.   I chuckled at this one – I grew up on the top floor of a family-built duplex, of which my own family now occupies the bottom floor.  Of course I’ll get this right.

I was so wrong.  I had to do it several times, and finally gave up when I ran into problems with it this last time on it.  Memory is obviously not the only thing distorting these floor plans.  Perception is possibly the even larger source of self-deception at work here.  It made this quite a fun assignment, for sure.  I think the proportions in this image are the key point to pay attention to – my room is HUGE compared to my brother’s, and even compared to the kitchen or the living room and maybe even the master bedroom.  And while my room was a little bit bigger than my brother’s, it wasn’t that much of a difference, and my room was certainly not the biggest in the house.  So it’s interesting that I’m portraying my own room so loudly now.

Friday‘s assignment was to show a classic title from your bookshelf and tell why I treasure it.

So many precious things here.  Their adorable voices – so young that even today, the two of them can’t tell who was who unless we tell them.  The stories within the story that comes out listening to them talk.  The made-up stuff that we only wish we understood.  The total love they have for him.  The classiness and total appreciation I show for all things holiday in forgetting when we got this for Justin, and seeing that I got it for him, in fact, two days after his birthday.  Just awesome.

Today‘s create was to take a photo that encompasses nothing, a void, absence.

I decided to capture the absence of water in my water bottle, from a fun perspective.  I had way too much fun playing with different angles for this shot, but in the end, settled on this one for today’s submission, which didn’t use any effects, just careful placement of my flash.  I loved the effects that came out of it.   I think that this photo uses a bit of balance in terms of design, in that it is symmetrical in a large way, and also uses the fact that it is off of the visual center up and to the left a bit in order to help capture the attention of the viewers here.