Below are some of my favorite fractalized (processed with Fractalius Photoshop plugin) images from early 2013. There are a few more on Flickr.
Swensson Memorial Band Shell, North Park, Lindsborg.
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Sunset on North 2nd Street.
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Lovely Medinilla flower.
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The old Lindsborg train depot.
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Blue spruce and icicles after a recent snow storm.
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The lovely (historical) home of renowned Lindsborg artist Anton Pearson.
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Spruce bough and snow, looks painting-like.
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All the time.
Well I know that blood pressure control starts with diet and exercise.
I’ve been exercising, to the tune of 2400+ miles ridden on my bike in the past 12 months!
Plus, we’ve always eaten reasonably well, not too much in the way of fast foods or fried foods. We did eat more fresh veggies in California, it’s true, but overall we eat what is generally considered a reasonably healthy diet.
But my BP has taken a hike, and I’m not happy about it.
I’ve investigated the wide variety of medications used to treat high blood pressure, and also the many possible side-effects.
At this point I accept that diet and exercise, alone, aren’t enough.
…
Ha! Who am I kidding? I’ve always said I’ll take medication to treat high blood pressure (back when it was a future thing) only if diet and exercise aren’t sufficient.
So I took a look at what I eat, and have come to the sad conclusion that my twice daily use of soy sauce is two times too many. 920 freaking milligrams of sodium per tablespoon pf soy sauce. And I probably used at least one per meal!
My poor heart!
I’ll have to find something new for lunch. Ramen noodles, flavored with soy and sambal have been instrumental in driving my weight loss these past 18 months. And as for flavoring my rice with soy and sambal, I’ve been doing that since my friend Jeff turned me onto the idea back in 1996. I’m sure I can have soy/sambal noodles and rice once a week, but 3-5 times like I did until today? No more!
And that’s how I measure getting older or some might even say growing up. Figuring out the problem and accepting the solution and then doing it, no whining, no complaining. I’m not happy, but some things you don’t mess with.
Here’s an unrelated image just to brighten the post a bit. It’s a composite of a time-lapse set of photos I took of the birds feeding outside my office window.
I’m almost 6 weeks into a what is planned to be a year long photography project and it seems like a good time to share.
As a photographic, creative and self-discipline challenge I’m taking a photo a day and posting it on a Tumblr blog called Mike’s 365.
Now, I’ve done something similar in the past. A few years ago I posted an image a day for a year, at a blog I called ::luminosity::.
The difference this time is that I’m both taking and posting a photo a day. Last time the goal was simply to post a photo a day, no matter when taken.
With an image collection numbering in the thousands, it’s not hard to find an image that is both reasonably good and previously unpublished, so meeting the daily publication goal wasn’t too terribly hard, though I won’t trivialize the effort. There’s a reason I stopped after a year.
Meeting the requirement of taking and posting the photo the same day is much more of a challenge. Of course, with a phone that can take a photo and post it all within seconds, the challenge isn’t technical. And there may be days when I post a picture of my pinky just to meet the challenge, but as I told Sheryl, we’ve accumulated a lot of knick-knacks over the years, and I have a small studio …
But so far I’m having fun, trying to be creative in both what I shoot and how I shoot it, and then extending that into using a wider variety of post-processing filters and tools to enhance the images.
Here’s a shot showing thumbnails of the first 41 photos posted on Mike’s 365; be sure to visit the site to see the large versions!
