How to best use my "Word Pictures" and a bit more about why I'm doing them

The reason I posted these uncropped images is to provide an easy opportunity for others to personalize / customize these images. That is also why I post them in highest quality resolution, suitable for printing up to full page size, rather than reduced for web

.So on the right side of such images could be church or organization contact info, or a special thought (say, a personalized mother's day card)... what ever.

Tent cards with an image, a verse, and contact information are especially useful for anyone involved with ministry to the least of the world who are the greatest in God's esteem.

Framed well matted images with a favorite verse or thought can also be very meaningful to people in times of need.

.God has blessed me with a good eye for photography and a superabundance of training and experience in ministering to the suffering & needy... by these images I hope to provide others resources they can use for free and customize instead of spending money on them as I once did.Its especially meaningful for me to be doing this since due to extreme life circumstances, this project is essentially the only opportunity to minister to the beloved of Christ, the outcast, sick and suffering.

Macro of Bleeding Hearts - 3d image from a movie - For a limited time only

Bleeding hearts synth.

My biggest frustration with Photosynth has been that it does not handle small subjects very well. So... my favorite way of learning a technique or piece of software is to push it and work it until it breaks.

Well, synth didn't "break" but when I put 600 images (20 seconds of avi footage) in, it scolded me.

For a little while I'll leave the synth up just so you can see what happens when you use a movie clip to create a synth.

The synth takes up a lot of space, and while an interesting experiment has no particular merit, so I'll be taking it down sooner or later.

Today's art / puppy therapy

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You can read about the video on Youtube.

Had to make some feeble attempt to approximate some form of existence beyond/besides my Promethean condition.

The ugliest photo I've ever taken or posted- what is it?

My mother calls this "oobleck" after the Dr. Seuss book.

We get it every year on our juniper. Doesn't seem to hurt it, but looks like the aftermath of a Ghostbusters expedition. (How's that for a hard-core child of the 80s ref.?)

ASTOUNDING PHOTO: Tess had a near miss with a twister on her way home yesterday

On her way back from seeing her doctor in Chicago yesterday, Tess and her best friend came very close to a funnel cloud. It crossed the highway not far from them. They were about 77 miles from Indianapolis at the time.

The first picture is as it came from her phone (2 megapix)

The second is unmodified except for the box showing area of circulation

The third I ran through Photofiltre free's sharpen and relief filters and fiddled with other settings to get the most relevant details to stand out.

She texted me right away, and I was unable to find any info about the storm, so I don't think it got reported.

BEST free software to batch extract stills from video: SuperC - also good for conversion, audio extraction, etc.

I've been trying to keep posting content others can use while I weather the drastic increase in intensity of my body's storm.

So I wanted to post the stills from the butterfly on lilac video.

While GOMplayer can do it, there were some aspects of its operation which made it less than idea. For a single image cap, its great, but for doing a series within a video, or the entire video, it falls down.

Irfanview has the capability in theory, but it doesn't seem to like Vista 64 professional, and to get it to extract images from an avi file, you need to go looking for codecs, installing package after package until you find one it likes... and even then it has a tendency to crash. Pity, Irfanview is one of the great success stories of the open source software movement. I have a friend whose employer could provide any image editing software on the market, and they use a customized version of irfanview.

I tried several other programs which promised this capability and didn't.

A particularly appealing program turned out to be "snoop-ware" Softwarepile Free Video Studio Decompiler.

Fortunately McAffee's siteadvisor toolbar caught the danger.

If you don't use this great free tool, its = to driving a car without airbags or seat belts.

Finally I tried Super (C). This article does a better job of explaining what it does than I can. Its a very powerful media manipulation program. It doesn't rely on external codecs, so it works seamlessly on any computer.

The interface is a bit hard to figure out, but its simple enough to use once you get used to its Control Panel / Windows Management Console like interface.

It was quick, it worked great, and doesn't much with the performance or operation of ANY other software, while ALL the other programs I tried did so.

Here's their homepage. I expect I'll be enthusing about other things I can do with it in the future.

Attention spam commentators... my blood work shows abnormally high testosterone levels, so I have no need of your enhancement products

And for the rest of you who do warrant the amount of CO2 you release into the atmosphere, if you've had trouble viewing my tulip pictures, try this: