Fantasy football and fun with videos

our-day weekends are one of my favorite things. Every month I switch schedules at work, so every other month I get a long weekend.

On Saturday, we had our fantasy football draft at our house. It was fun to have the team over for a little fun. I think I got a pretty good team, but I ended up with Brett Favre as my quarterback. Not happy about that, but I have Maurice Jones-Drew and Randy Moss, so I hope they make up for the old man. Not that Randy Moss is all that young either. We'll see how it goes. If you're curious (and probably only Amanda will be), the rest of my team is Rashard Mendenhall, Steve Smith (Panthers), Ricky Williams, Tony Gonzalez, Hakeem Nicks (go heels!), Jerome Harrison, Mike Wallace, Kevin Kolb, Darren Sproles, Kenny Britt, Bengals Def., and Matt Prater for my kicker.

On Sunday, Jack flew in to pick up Mary and to get some of his things from the condo. He'll be returning to Chicago soon, and we were glad to see him. After hanging out with Jack and Mary for a while, I decided that I needed to catch up on video editing from our trips this year or I may never do it. And here are the results.....

The first is Evan playing in the hotel when we met Amanda and Robert in Orlando in August.



The second is from my trip to Maine for work in July.



And the third is from our trip to the NC mountains in April, where Scott proposed!

More new tricks

fter our short trip to the NC mountains this summer to find a place to get hitched, we stayed in Raleigh a few days with dad and Judy. I don't even want to get into the extensive car trouble that caused our Raleigh visit to be extended.

One night Dad pulled out the old photo albums after I showed him our family tree on ancestry.com. I decided to take photos of some of them so I could have them and to post on ancestry.com.

Skip to last night. {JACK-- take notice, you should check this out!} I'm just catching up on reading my blogs and emails, and I run into this website. It is a great place to find all of these links to free photoshop actions! She also has tutorials and other goodies. That site led me to the CoffeeShop, which has tons of free photoshop actions here. This one is also a treasure chest of goodies and tutorials.

I normally don't get to do this stuff with my photos because I work for the newspaper and straightforward is what they want. So it's fun to play with some of our vacation photos and the old family photos I copied this summer.

Here's a sampling of the new stuff I learned.......

This is a photo of my dad in high school I think or early college. I downloaded an action to make it look like an old polaroid print on watercolor paper. Awesome! There are several different options with this.

This is a photo of my great grandfather Hallie Glover and his brother Thadieus. It must have been taken in the 30s or 40s. The photo was already colorized like this, but I downloaded an action to make the corners rounded and add a drop shadow.

clockwise from top left: My grandmother, Kay, as a child with Grandma Glover (great grandma), Mama Ethel (great great gma), and Wilma Glover (great great aunt); My grandparents with my dad as a child; My grandma, Kay, with dad; and dad at the beach when he was little.
For this one I learned how to use clipping masks to create this storyboard. She also has storyboards that make themselves using actions, like this one. So cool! And a huge timesaver or time waster depending on how you look at it. I've already spent hours playing with this stuff.

River cruise

his week has been a GREAT weather week by my standards. We've barely seen the sun because of the rain and clouds. We have had a little too much rain, but it hasn't been over 90 degrees all week, and that has to be some kind of record for Florida.

swing on the river......oh how dreamy!

Yesterday I was chosen to cruise the Caloosahatchee river with reporter Amy Williams and our new videographer Brian. I was a little scared my new camera would get wet in the predicted rain, but pumped that the sun wouldn't make this an unbearable experience. I still got sunburned through all the clouds, but with a little breeze it was a great trip. No rain at all. It was my first trip through the Franklin Lock-- pretty cool. Then we spotted some beautiful horses on the bank after the Caloosahatchee Regional Park.

Then we saw this guy smiling at us! haaaaaay!

And then this guy! A two-humped camel.

Sunset. It just never gets old.

other Nature was at her best again tonight. The light outside after sunset was absolutely spectacular. These are from our front yard. Enjoy.....

And a bonus. This little guy just visited us on our back door.

New toys

n my many hours of scouring wedding and graphic design blogs, I came across some photoshop actions on a photography blog. They basically automatically tone photos for you in different ways. Here are the results:

Original

Wood Frame

Sunshine

Heartland

Edge Burn

Colorized

and 70's....

Pretty cool with just one click of a button considering it took me a lot of experimentation and still could not get photos to look like this.

Perseid Meteor Shower

cott and I decided to make an effort to see this year's Perseid meteor shower. So when I got off work, we headed out to the beach on Sanibel Island with our chairs, the camera and tripod to see some meteors. We usually just try to see some from our backyard, but our proximity to downtown and the streetlights kindof put a damper on stargazing.

We got lucky and saw quite a show. This photo has three meteors in it!

Are you ready for some football?

his week has been all about high school football so far, so I thought I'd post a few of the videos I did from local practices. Watch them again and again!

Riverdale:



Cape Coral:



And Mariner.....

O-Town

heme parks? Who needs them when you have a two-year-old to entertain you?
We're having lots of fun with Evan, Amanda and Robert in Orlando. Today we went swimming in the hotel pool. Evan LOVES to swim. And my underwater video camera came in quite handy........

Sunset

e've been having some incredible sunsets lately. Thought I'd share one from our front yard Friday night.