Saturday 21 July 2007

Refraction

Three quick photos:


Friday 20 July 2007

Tour de France in Castres

Stage 12 of the Tour de France, Montpellier to Castres.
Making his second win so far, Tom Boonen was first to cross the finish line. Anyway, here's some photos I took.

The first helicopters had flown into sight. Soon after, 4 more flew into view. The excitement was starting to build. After 3/4 of an hour waiting, the cyclists were going to arrive.


Yeah...well, the helicopters were early. I don't suppose it really mattered to these guys, who probably arrived long before us. They even brought their own picnic table^^.
They didn't get better places than us anyway.


After all the sponsors had gone past, the police rolled by, warning everyone to stand back.


After what seemed like hours of waiting, they finally shot past. All that waiting for about 20 seconds of action. It was worth it though.




We were on live TV ^^ Smile!




Spare wheels!




Everyone had raced past. We thought we had seen everybody. Then in the distance, we saw this guy approaching, with his own mini police force.


But he wasn't the last. Another group shortly arrived (and their mini police force).


And last of all, this group came waltzing by. They weren't exactly bothered about going fast.
The two at the front were having a nice chat^^


Spare bikes anyone?

Friday 13 July 2007

Trembling rocks


This house has been in the Du Gres family for 500 years now. Located right in the middle of the Sidobre, their garden is full of huge granite boulders. They even have some trembling rocks. Quite literally. Not far from this house, there's another trembling rock, it's quite a sight when an old granny suddenly comes out of her farm house, then starts moving a huge boulder weighing a couple of hundred tonnes. Afterwards, she walks around holding out her little basket, until everyone has put some money in.

Here's a snapshot of their back garden (about 300 hectares), although I'm not sure if these rocks tremble.



This is a typical French sausage, called a saucisse de Toulouse. It's now on the barbecue, but it took a bit of struggling to get up all wound up.


After it had been cooked:


Nice shoes!


My brother, my sister, my dad and me on yet another granite boulder




I just wondered why they decided to build a door there of all places. Normally doors are on the ground floor, that way there's no drop. ^^


Their house:


This is the same photo as the one a few before, but guess what's missing.


Herne having a siesta after having eaten a big lunch. He even sleeps with his football ^^


A couple of farm houses somewhere in their garden.


2 ferrets:



Tuesday 10 July 2007

Down to business


Nothing wrong with this card? Well , look closely - all the information is wrong! Fax doesn't even exist anymore. So we needed to print a new one. So after touching it up on photoshop (otherwise it would have been a bad quality, crooked image which looks like it's been scanned on to the card^^), and rewriting the address, we set out to find a website to print our new card. Last time we went to the printing shop in town, they were rubbish! When you don't know how to work the software used in the shop, you're not going to get very far...

Anyway, the site we found was VistaPrint. A site that actually delivered to France... Very useful. Unfortunately their cards aren't the same dimensions as our original (our dimensions were better) and there's all this crap about bleed lines, safe area, trim lines etc. to avoid the design having a white border or half of the design cut off. After fiddling around with the text position, and changing the dimensions, we got a non-stretched design which seemed to fit into the safe area, trim lines, etc..

Enough talking, here's what we ended up with. It doesn't actually look that different after all that effort I put into it.




We got the cards now, and thankfully we're not missing half the design. Phew...
Mind you, on the screen, it shows a light green and the actual card is a dark green. Anyone got an explanation?

Saturday 7 July 2007

Photoshop CS3

I've been using the trial version of Photoshop CS3 Extended for 2 days now- only 28 days left, time's running out fast ^^ - and, well... it's brilliant! It seems you can do just about everthing, only problem is that it's quite expensive.

The best site I've found so far for tutorials is Planet Photoshop. Most of what I've done so far has been inspired from the video tutorials (by Corey Barker).







This was all about cutting out hair, then placing it on another background. It wasn't actually as hard as I thought it was going to be, as long as it's photoshop that does it. I can't imagine doing it manually. ^^


And last but not least this is the Barcelona cathedral, pushing out of its boundaries.

Thursday 5 July 2007

Herne Illustrated



If I had to choose a photo to best represent Herne, it would have be a football. Here's a link to his blog: Footy Mad
I drew this photo in Adobe Illustrator.
Here another photo I made in Illustrator:
(try looking at it from far away)