A little low-fi work at the San Francisco Zoo

 

This was just having a little fun with post processing.

One of my favorites at the San Francisco Zoo

This Eagle at the San Francisco Zoo is one of my favorites. Basically she is a rescue bird. Her wing was damaged and she surely would have died in the wild, but here on her own island, she remains majestic and powerful all the same.

Hooded Orioles in San Jose

Another backyard bird arrived. The fist time I saw it, I was stunned, I was in the front yard and it landed on our fence but by the time I got my camera, it was gone. The next time, I was in the kitchen and heard a bird song I did not recognize so I grabbed my camera and headed out back and there it was, all mixed up with the branches.

Illustrator Final – Portrait

 

My final was to make a portrait. I think this image has all of the hard things in it: straight ahead faces, ears, hair, and hands. Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment. In any case, the image came from a friend’s facebook post for him and his fiancee’s engagement; aren’t they a cute couple? I re-sized it and then I followed the instructions on making a Scanner Darkly style image here.  So blacks, then blues, then hair and on and on. I hope I did them justice.

Backyard Birds v3

 

Well that’s it. We came home the other day to see the young ones sitting in the yard under a tree. Not good with the dogs. We’re thinking, great, how long will this go on, we can’t have them stuck in the back yard on the ground, that won’t work. Luckily, a little while later, the mom came down for a feeding, then flew up to top of the fence. They paced a little bit and then finally followed her up like pros. What a relief, they can fly! This was the last time we saw them all together.

New Features in Adobe Illustrator CS6

I am putting this here so I don’t forget, part of my new Memory Overflow category.

Iaroslav Lazunov over at designmodo.com put this nice list together describing what is new in Adobe Illustrator CS6 (this link here covers the whole CS6 Suite). He even shows some examples of how to use the new or changed tools. While he does talk about gradients on strokes and pattern creation, the two biggies everyone keeps writing about. He also goes into some of the little things that make the program better.

I for one am hoping it is more stable and with the 64bit support and ability to use more ram, maybe it will be.

Sadly, you still can’t scrub values, select colors outside the color picker or rotate the canvas (view) in Illustrator CS6 like you have been able to do in Photoshop for a while now.

Backyard Birds v2

A few more shots over the last week growing like weeds. The parents can’t keep up with the feedings at this point and need to leave them to get more grub.