anyways , WE’RE HOME!

Geordan’s cuteness won a contest! we won a sitting with a professional photographer. no, not the walmart, sear or local mall photographer. we’re talking the rich people photo-taker. little did i know that she’d want to charge us $125 per photo! nearest i can tell, all she was gonna do is crop it, ship it off to a graphical designer to clean it up and then charge us $125 per photo. she musta been crazy. i’m not cheap, but damn! i can do this myself. if it proves to be too hard, i’ll just ship it to my homeboy Casey.

the lady had the nerve to ask us if she could pimp my boy to sell her photos at malls and clinics. she’d pay us 1 whole 5X7.

i’m in the process of adjusting and editing the photos. i’m using an open source program called The GIMP . its excellent. its every bit as powerful as photoshop, but its FREE. so check it out. for those of you too simple to handle linux GUIs, there’s a program call GIMPshop. I, being almost too simple, alternate back and forth between the two.

We start with a basic photo. its pretty cute.

then i removed the backround. this was a little hard, but i had my trusty instruction manual. please ignor the random ’02′.

then i add the professional afterglow. it highlights and softens the photos and gets rid of blemishes. its not at all as easy as i made it out to be. but here it is!Â

this is another photo i did. i made it black and white, then i colored in the passy with the original color. this is hard but fun!

We should be getting Geordan’s birth announcements out pretty soon. we’re working on it! sorry we’re so slack. i’m not sure how ya’ll people manage to feed and clothe both your baby and yourselves AND get those damn announcement out within the first year!

QUICK! another Geordan photo:

 this is our money-maker. we’re gonna send this into some baby contests. he was smiling after the bath. i LOVE this mischievious look. i can see daughters across america falling for it! I dub it his official ‘come hither‘ look.

i figured this would be a good time to practice some of my newfound ‘graphic design editing’ prowess. As you can see here, i’ve duplicated the photo and grayscaled it. i added a layer to the original above the photo. I copy and pasted the new B&W image onto the new layer, over the original color image. I added a transparent layer mask to the new layer, would allowed me to paint ‘transparent’ into the B&W photo. you can see my half done attempt to the left – my baby isnt two-toned!. Then all i had to do was zoom to like 400% and color it in pixel by pixel. i was rather disappointed. the result was kinda plain and didnt look to different from the original. But we persevere. I saw something called Sepia tone (1) and  Vignetting(2).

I’m confident that we’ll get something out of this whole thing. Geordan is looking pretty cute these days!

 Notes:

• (1) Sepia tone is a type of monochrome photographic image in which the picture appears in shades of brown as opposed to greyscale as in a black-and-white image. It was originally produced by adding a pigment made from the Sepia cuttlefish to the positive print of a photograph taken with any number of negative processes. The chemical process involved converts any remaining metallic silver to a sulphide which is much more resistant to breakdown over time. This is why many “old time” photographs are sepia toned—those are the ones that have survived until today.
• Â (2) Vignetting is a visual effect of darkened corners used to help frame an image or soften the frame outline.