Horses and daffodils

As I have said, this really ought to be what I call this blog, since said items feature rather often. While making the pink and yellow grid collage the other day, I inadvertantly hit the multi-exposure option instead, and discovered another potential source of frittering away hours messing about...

If you use a lot of different images, they become so dense as to become almost unrecognisable as anything, the vertical slices are the result of using both landscape and portrait orientations,

and for some odd reason, if you use a really large number of photos, it can't always cope with it and only produces a heavily horizontally cropped section, like the one below.

I do like Picasa, the editing tool for idiots. However, lovely Apprentice, by whose photographic, poetic, horticultural and many other skills, and general greatness of soul I am unfailingly impressed, is taking me in hand, and very generously going to share her Photoshop secrets and try to teach me. I have Photoshop, in French. I have always pleaded this as the reason I don't get to grips with it, but it is largely a pathetic excuse; everything is in exactly the same place, and, frankly, an unsharp mask means as little to me in English as whatever is it's French equivalent. So in anticipation, and not to be entirely unprepared, I have been trying to find out about curves. Anything I read in books or on webpages failed to get anything through my thick head as to even what the two axes on the curves graph represented, but then I found this video on Youtube, and the penny dropped.

However, what also became clear was that there was a huge amount more I didn't understand. Socrates was right, the old smartarse. At the moment, I'm not really able to achieve much more with curves than with Picasa's little shadows and highlights sliders, until I find out more.

So this is my mission, to learn more of Photoshop, with Apprentice's very generous help. Though I might still find myself slipping back over to Picasa to mess about in a hit and miss fashion.

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A couple of updates:

I took the collage to post to Bangalore, from where it should be forwarded to Bihar. Asked if they could put some pretty stamps on it, and the post-lady said, might it not be stolen for the stamps, she had heard that could happen...? To be on the safe side she printed out a vignette instead. Is this a possibility?

Throat is better, and I'm tasting almost everything normally again, except for red wine ( I haven't tried white...), orange juice is OK, not quite right. However, in my rediscovery of beer, I have also rediscovered the fabulous Brasserie Lancelot. Difficult to say which is more beautiful, the artwork on their bottles or the heavenly nectar contained within. The one made with blé noir, buckwheat, called Telenn du, is like a light, soft, smooth Guinness, but better, and when the blonde pure malt Duchesse Anne I opened this evening exploded much of its contents on the kitchen worktop, I unashamedly spooned as much as I could rescue into my glass rather than waste a drop. The founder really is called Lancelot and the brewery is situated in the Forest of Broceliande. Some kind of magic is there.