SWMBO

On Sunday, my husband declared me 'Officially Welcomed to Australia' and said I was now allowed to be in the country ... in his apartment.

Why, now?

Because my flowers had finally opened:

So, starting to feel a little under the weather, and flying to Cairns on Thursday, I was taking it easy on Monday, and decided to figure out how to make my own Vignettes using the 'gradient' tool in Photoshop.

I also wanted to play with 'depth of field' so set my aperture setting to 4.0 (small number - thus a large opening) to see how blurry I could get the hanging prints on the wall behind the flowers. Didn't blur them as much as I wanted to, but hey - at least I am able to make a conscious choice on whether I want them in focus or not - that is a long ways from where I started.

Vignette on Sundays flower photo (pulls the eye to the flower, no?):

Just in case you can't see it - a vignette is the slight darkening around the edges of the photo that gives it a framed, polished look ...

Monday night, when I started this blog, I noticed the flower had opened up and looked much nicer - but now taking night shots:

Then things got really ugly and I was in bed all day Tuesday - totally fell off the face of the earth for a good 24 hours. Am now up (my Wed afternoon) thinking I need to be productive ... but the best I can come up with is to blog ...

Opening up very nicely:

Played around with the vignettes being a colour other than black (here I matched the green to the green on the leaves):


Here I matched the green to the green on the unopened flower pods (and when I say 'matched' I mean -literally - matched - you can take an eyedropper tool and hover over a colour, click, and it will automatically set your foreground colour to be that EXACT colour).

A shot with more of the flowers and hanging prints showing ... just for fun:

Then I played with opacity (SO don't want to be productive today ...) of the vignette. The gradient tool, in where I am creating the vignette, goes from 100% to transparent - unless I change the opacity to something other than 100% - then it starts from there and goes to transparent.

Here I started with 100%:

This is 50%

And 25%

Which looks best? I guess I like 50% - 70% best - 100% is too much but 25% is too little - except for situations where you want more or less ... duh ....

SWMBO

So ... the title ... (we are pronouncing it 'swim bow')

On Monday I was playing around with photos and Photoshop while Gary was finishing his lesson he was teaching in Institute the next evening. OR SO I THOUGHT.

He suddenly burst out in hysterical laughter.

Since he was working on a religious lesson, and things are generally not 'hysterically funny' when preparing them ... I started to suspect that he might have decided to stall and not be working on it - just playing around.

He asked me if I knew what SWMBO meant? I told him I had never heard of it, got up to come over to his computer to see what he was talking about and he was in a Wood Workers magazine.

Naughty, naughty, naughty ...

He was reading a review on a certain type of wood (or a piece of furniture the reviewer built ... I forget now) and it stated: "It worked well and SWMBO and my daughters are not complaining so they must like it also" - or something like that ...

He didn't know what SWMBO was so he googled it:

SWMBO: She Who Must Be Obeyed ...

Laughing, he told me I would probably be hearing that 'word' again ...

I told him that, yes, HE most definitely would be!