Photoshop magic..

During the function for my dad on mom  last week, I had to be performing a lot of things.. which meant my stint with the camera was done.. 

I usually don't trust others with pictures for events.. and definitely don't trust others with my camera.. however on recent trips, have been handing my camera to my baby cousin (who is not a baby anymore) and teaching her how to hold steady, focus and shoot with the 5D mark ii and she has a really good eye for composition.. told her to keep clicking and leave the rest to me to photoshop..

She did me proud.. We did hire professionals for the event but they are working on the photos. We should have great pictures in a week or two.

Saw this one pic where San has her cute dimply smile and I really wanted to make a portrait out of it.. (Credit to my cousin for cracking the right joke at the right time!).. 

The background.. I needed some recently shot greenery.. and the photo from Amethyst gave me an idea..

So here is 2+2=6..

The original..

the background from a group photo..

and the end result..

Have been lost in photoshop for a long time.. work calls tomorrow. My cold is almost bearable.. have been doing yoga everyday during the break and resting and working on photoshop as a good distraction.

Also my wife is back from India and that alone is a big relief.. my girls know how to press my buttons and get anything they want and sometimes I don't know if I am authorized to authorize things.. good that the big boss is back in the approval loop.

Ta ta for now..

After a 10 year wait...

There used to be a large apple tree in our backyard when we moved into this house 13+ years ago. It was one of the big draws for us to get the house.. then we went through construction and the construction workers cleaned up their paint brushes under the tree, peed near it and before we know it, we lost the tree to some disease..

It took me some time to get over having to cut it to the roots so the disease wouldn't spread to other trees. Shortly after that I planted another apple tree. It never grew tall and its top branches were always breaking with the weight of squirrels and there were 5 mini stunted apples a few years ago.. we were also going through a drought.

We are having more flowers this year..

and we have apples on the tree. After almost 10 years, we are seeing apples in bunches!

This made my day..

Was searching old blog posts to find a picture of the apple tree.. we used to have a beautiful backyard.. not that the current setup is not pretty, but things change over time and it is a part of life. That old tree must have been 30+ years old at least to have that girth and height. 

At least we have planted new trees and hope they will be around for some time..

Another then and now post..

My parents.. at their wedding.. photoshopped this from an old torn pic from their wedding album.. Haven't figured out how to colorize it yet..

This one was taken ~20 years ago..

was in grad school at the time.. my sister gave me a large copy of this photo on this trip which I promptly digitized.

This was taken last Thursday.. did try to copy over the background from the 20 year photo to match.. don't even know why I spent a good 20 minutes trying to learn how to do that on photoshop... but it will come in handy sometime in the future!

They are not into saving sweaters... still as long as I am around, they will have pictures and blog posts to see how they are aging gracefully!