I’ve had a blog on Blogger for some time that also has free stock photos, and I’ve decided to (gasp) keep that one and update it more often. The reason is simple…Blogger offers me more functionality in being able to edit the blog design, and in search functions, and uses Picasa Web Albums to store the photos when I need to. WordPress offers not so much in the way of being able to edit the template unless you pay for it (and I haven’t been all that pleased with the new templates and sorely miss the Cutline one), and the storage facilities aren’t as good. Blogger also allows me to purchase a domain name and set it up for meager fee – $10 a year. WordPress allows you to set up a domain, but it costs more money, and you pay for the mapping.

Blogger also allows me to place ads – and although that isn’t the only reason I chose to stick with the Blogger blog, it was the icing on the cake.  I can use affiliate links to my stock sites where I sell my commercial images, and if I want, I can use AdSense or other ads. Even if I only come up with $100  a year in advertising earnings (you need that much to get paid with AdSense, but less with other advertisers) it will pay for the cost of domain name registrations each year, and perhaps upgrading the storage amount if I run out.

Not that I intend to place a big pile of ads on my site – there’s nothing worse than a site loaded with so many ads you can’t find the contents. But even one unobtrusive text link unit will be helpful.

I have no problems with providing free content to people – if you don’t like the ad, turn on an adblocker when you visit – that isn’t going to bother me much. If I can pay for the upcoming domain name (haven’t bought that yet, but will…very soon) then I’m happy with that.

So, for any of you who’ve been using images from this blog, you’ll find them all ported over to Gracey’s Free Stock Photos. It’s a simple place – no dancing, blinking, bouncing ads, no fancy gewgaws, much like this place here.

If you aren’t happy with that, you can still get full size images over on Free-3D-Textures.com, and always will be able to. So, wordpress fans, it’s bee a slice, but this girl’s cake is just gettin’ too tired to frost anymore. Thanks for everything guys – happy blogging, wherever you go.

Thanksgiving Weekend - Rural Colours

We’re moving into the cooler weather now…not cold, except overnight where it dips down to minus 1 celcius already, but we’ve had a pretty wet fall. Most of September was rather wet with much cooler temperatures than we generally see in September. It was a little disappointing, really…we look at September as the last blast of summer, but this year it felt much more like the omen of a bad winter to come than the end of summer. We saw temperatures dipping down to almost freezing even at the end of August during the night, making for an early show of autumn colour. Normally the leaves

Thanksgiving Trees

don’t begin to show the change of season until sometime in late September/early October, but 2010 brought the colour change while we were still counting off the days of August.

I really love the autumn…it’s blaze of colour makes our country surroundings beautiful, especially during the early periods of fall when the grass and some of the trees are still the bright strident green you see after a rainfall. The heavy night dews give the autumn grass and lawn a deep green we don’t see at other times of the year. Spring grass has a light fresh green colour, and summer grass has a

Langman Sanctuary in Autumn - Orillia, Ont.

slightly dry and sometimes dull green from the hot days and little rain, but in fall it’s simply that colour we call green – grass green. The bright yellows, reds, oranges and sometimes brown or melon of the leaves contrasting with that lovely green is a jaw-dropping blast in our part of the world. I love it. Crisp days of sunshine, blue sky, and even bluer water.

During the summer the water tends to get a little greenish here – that’s a sign of all the activity on our lakes – boaters, swimmers and more boaters, but in the autumn the lakes change to a deep blue. Probably because the waters are cooling a little, and probably partly because the boaters are gone for the season and the algae that gets churned up in the summer settles back down to the bottom. The colours of autumn reflect of the blue of the

Reflecting Colours at Langman Sanctuary

stiller waters like they were reflecting off a mirror -  peaceful and gorgeous.

In Canada, we’re celebrating our Thanksgiving holiday this weekend.  We sort of look at this as the last official long weekend for things like camping, and summer cottages. Our area has many cottages that are winterized, but those whose cottages aren’t, close them up over the Thanksgiving weekend and tuck them in for a long winter. Boaters winterize their boats and put them into storage, classic car enthusiasts tuck their beauties into garages to keep themout of the winter snows and life slows down again for a little while. Tourists are mostly gone and we have our town back, stores have Halloween decorations one one side of the aisle and Christmas on the other side, kids are back in school, and the holidays are finished. At least until Christmas. Monday is our Thanksgiving (Oct 10), and we’ve spent the weekend working in the gardens getting them ready to survive the long cold winter ahead; we also usually spend time driving about the rural roads trying to record the lovely autumn colors.

Pumpkins for Pie

Autumn is short here – at least most of the time. You never really know when the colours will be gone. You can get up one day and see a glorious countryside full of colours you can’t even describe, and get up the next morning to trees that have shed through the night. At this time of year all it takes is a rainy, windy night and it’s over. The colours of fall lay strewn across field and pavement and lake, like so many pieces of confetti.

As is always the case, I’m not looking forward to winter at all. I hate the cold. I hate being cold.

More Photos from the Weekend

Colours of Fall - Rural Roadside

Local Farm in Autumn

Rural Autumn Laneway & Fields

Workhorses in October Field

Geese in Flight - Langman Sanctuary

Trumpeter Swan at Langman Sanctuary - October

Langman Sanctuary - Trumpeter Swan

Anybody looking for images specifically for Thanksgiving and Halloween can find some more over in the royalty free stock photo section (did I mention, they’re free to use) on Free-3D-Textures.com. Don’t forget to check the graphics and .png sections too – they each have a few related images.

Not far from our house is a large wooded area open to the public which is known as “Grants Woods”. This used to be a private estate, and on the grounds is a fieldstone house and a large gazebo at the side yard. This gazebo has a picnic table and benches around the edges, with feeding platforms for the birds. Nearby are a number of feeding stations for the birds too. We discovered on a recent outing that if a person sits at the gazebo, you can see and photograph the birds without frightening them away.  On that particular day, I was only equipped with a 200mm lens, so I wasn’t able to get as close as I’d have liked.  If you leave the gazebo to move closer to the feeding stations, the birds disappear in a hurry.   We’re planning another trip out there to simply sit and watch (ie: photograph) the birds, but this time I’ll be taking my 400mm lens and tripod and setting it up in the gazebo.

This last trip I managed to photograph a young bluejay, and a pair of hairy woodpeckers (male and female), along with a sparrow, who appears to be able to share the feeder with the bluejay and not get into arguments. But besides those I managed to capture, there are yellow fitches, and tufted titmouse, and I’m pretty certain I also saw a cedar waxwing. I was hoping to find a cardinal, but we were only at the gazebo for a short period of time at the end of our treck through the forest and woods.

A quick hop from there on our way home and we were at the sanctuary (hard place for me to stay away from), where we got a look at this year’s crop of baby mute swans; they’ve grown from small bundles of fuzz into the youth stage, though they are only about 4-5 months old right now. Of the four babies, two are white, and two are brown (the brown is most common until they are adults, with white babies being less common). The Orillia Fish & Game Conservation club have been working in the swan pond and fixed up an area that was quite overgrown. They’ve removed some of the wilder undergrowth and patched up some areas with gravel and generally have spent some time cleaning up the area. I was rather surprised at the number of ducks resting in this area – generally you might see two or three ducks at the swan’s pond, but on this trip there were more than a dozen sitting quietly in the cleaned up areas near the gravel beds. The swans seem happy enough to share their compound with the ducks, but don’t tolerate the geese very well.

On this trip we took along a couple of heads of lettuce to feed the swans (they eat greens or corn) and as my husband approached the fence they lined up side-by-side to receive their greens. It was funny to see them in a neat row like that – most of the time they are stepping on each other to get to the food, although they certainly don’t go hungry. The pond is full of growth for them to feed off, and the OFGC has a member feed the swans every day with boxes of greens and corn, and of course at some point through the day, there are always visitors to feed them.

You should be able to download any of the images from this post (the full size available) by clicking on the image.

Today’s offerings are just a mix of images, some taken over this summer, some old favourites, and some…well, just because I felt like it. As I gathered the images together,  they resolved themselves into categories – seasons, like autumn/fall, spring florals, and toys. Most of the pictures bring back memories of holidays, or places, and some even reminded me of the people I was with when the photos were taken.

I don’t really have much to say today, I’m not feeling very chatty, so hopefully in this mad mix of free images, you’ll find something useful. Most of these are sized at around 1000 pixels on the longest size, and saved ready to use for websites or blogs. If you need larger or higher res images, many of these are already uploaded over on Free-3d-Textures so you can head on over there to find the bigger ones.

I did a fairly large update on Free-3D-Textures.com and added a bunch of new photos. Photo updates have been going a little slower, mostly because of my time spent outdoors, but I think the photo count is up around 750 now on the royalty free stock photos. This update includes some summer-fun photos, and a few “odds and sods” here and there.

Our grandkids love getting out in the boat with us – one of their favourite activities is tubing, but we haven’t gone out and purchased one as of yet. We’ve used a borrowed one on occasion and while it’s a blast of fun, it scares me a little. Seeing my grandkids bouncing off a flying donut in a rough lake full of other boaters scares the crap out of me…I know it shouldn’t, because we follow all the safety rules, but still…. When my own girls were little we taught them how to waterski and that didn’t scare me as much as watching my grandkids in these tubes…which to me look like nothing more than huge inner-tubes with a bottom.  Most often when we’ve got the kids out we’ll take the boat over to one of provincial parks (we’ve got a few in our area) and anchor off the swimming area and we’ll all swim off the boat.

This year we invested in some new life jackets too. Boating regulations have changed a little, and boaters must now have a license to drive a boat in our waters, and kids can’t anymore. That’s a step forward, really. There were too many people on the lakes with little to no knowledge of proper boating. The OPP have been out in force on the lakes this year, checking for licensed drivers and checking for the requirements – on board you must have enough life jackets for each passenger. People under 16 must wear a life jacket appropriate to their size while in the boat, adults must have one within reach. Other requirements are paddles, bailers, anchors…an assortment of items for safety purposes. We have all that…we’ve always had all that, but my husband and I have been boating on and off since we were kids. I still haven’t bothered to go and my license, but I probably should…when I have time.  We probably have something like 10 life jackets on board now – too many really, because our boat doesn’t have the capacity for 10. We can seat about 8 comfortably – 10 if we need to, but we seldom do.  We can seat 6 in the boat itself (seats for everyone), and 4 kids (or 2 adults) in the bow.

Our grandkids all have their own life vests because their other granparents are also boaters, but we really need to get a couple of kids jackets for the boat. Two of them can wear the adult small jackets, but two still need a kids jacket and there have been times when they forgot to bring their own. We have a couple of neck-style flotation devices (older, but still work) that do fit them, but, like everything else in life these things need updated from time to time.

Today is Sunday…and supposed to be a nicer day out. I’m thinking we might have to go buy a tube today!

©Veronica Stinson-Hickey, Hickey Family Fotography.com (with permission)

The plan was to have  large garage sale and sell off the works, except for the few smaller things she could fit into a private room in a Nursing Home (still waiting for that – the wait time is 6 months to a year).  I spent nearly two weeks UNpacking all the boxes we brought here, washing the stuff in them, pricing them and then REpacking them so that we’d be ready come garage sale day. That’s today. Unfortunately, it appears to be raining, and on checking the weather…is going to continue raining all day.  I’m not sure what we’ll do at this point (shudder).

For most her married life, my aunt has been a collector of blue and white. It started with Delft, and blossomed into almost anything that was blue and white . She has a rather extensive collection of Delft, and a collection of Royal Crown Derby china in blue white; the pattern title is “Mikado”. Unless you happen to be a china collector you wouldn’t understand how difficult (or expensive) it is to try to collect that particular pattern.  She also had a large”ish” collection of Blue Willow (old stuff, not the kind you can buy today). On top of those, she has a large (12 full place settings) of Royal Doulton dinnerware in the Fleur deLis pattern – lovely and delicate, but difficult to match today. It’s about 45+ years old. That’s only a smattering of the things in her home – she had a fetish for oriental figurines and decor, though we’ve passed on many of the smaller pieces to my niece, who (she’s 15) had fallen in love with my aunt’s oriental  pieces.

I’m really not sure how much longer I can live with all this stuff in my home. I’m an orderly person when it comes to my home – everything placed just so and not a lot of nic-nacs.  Being surrounded by boxes and boxes of “stuff” (even good stuff)  has made me a little crabby of late – not being able to clean properly or keep things tidy has kept me from doing some of things I do on a normal basis – my photography studio is one of the rooms that’s filled floor to ceiling and wall to wall. There’s a small path leading to the storage closet with my equipment, but the equipment isn’t that much good if there’s no where to set it up. My office is the other room that’s packed with boxes, with a pathway to my computer. Unfortunately, I can’t get into the shelving units, or my file cabinets, and although I can “reach out and touch” my printer, I can’t open it (too many boxes in front of it) to put in the paper (not the  paper roll, nor the sheet papers) so even making prints to sell is out of the question right now.

(sigh) This too shall pass.

At the moment, if you want to use these images you’ll have to download them in size available from this blog. Eventually when we manage to get through the sale and cleanup, these images (and many more – there are 20 of these plates above, along with mugs, jubs, bowls, etc.) will be uploaded to my free stock site and will be available in larger sizes. Right now, I just haven’t the time to upload them all.

Wish me luck!

When it comes to stuff like this, you just have to put family first – particularly since we are getting pretty short on older family members. Once she’s no longer with us, my generation will be the “oldies” of our family (shudder). I’m not sure I ever saw myself in that position before…

Anyway, in honor of my aunt, here are a few more photos from her place. There’s another chair – a chinese victorian chair in gold with an oriental patterned fabric in black – it sits rather prettily in her guest bedroom, as does the dresser set. It’s an english porcelain set with pink and raspberry designs. Also from the same room is this lamp which sits on the night table at the bedside. It’s a vintage lamp from the early 1950s in the shape of a victorian lady; here, the skirt and lampshade are made from the fabric of the bedspread and window coverings.

From the top of the dresser comes this vintage glass lamp (1940s) with red glass shade a crystal drops. My grandmother got these lamps, one at a time, by collecting coupons from laundry detergent at some of the homes where she worked as a cleaner.  My grandmother raised her children mostly alone, and lost one at the age of 12. In a time when women with kids didn’t work outside the home she did many things to keep her family together – from cleaning homes of the wealthy, to taking in laundry, and sending her kids out to follow the coal truck to pick up any bits of coal that fell off so they could heat their home. Considering the age of these glass lamps, they must have been “prized” back then. Today, they are still in excellent condition with no chips or nicks in the glass, or crystals.

From her dining room, a chinoiserie-style pair of candlesticks – quite tall, but rather interesting with their gold, rose and pale blue designs.

Other images uploaded in the last couple of weeks include some more landscapes, a couple of buildings, more piggy banks, a corded telephone, three vintage autos on white backgrounds, and other varieties of stock type images. And of course you can download whatever you like from any of the sections at Free-3D-Textures.com and use them on your blog or website, or most other purposes. Just read the (very liberal) use policy. Don’t forget to checkout the textures section, and the two new sections – one contains photo edges and photo frames, and the other has some free templates in .psd format for use in photoshop.

In preparing for the upcoming Easter season, I’ve upload four easter eggs with designs – these are in black and white so you can colour them in photoshop yourself, or print them off (they’ll print on an 8X10 sheet) for your kids to colour. And one completed graphic of a coloured easter egg with a nice big bow on top. If I have the time, I plan to upload coloured versions of the black and white eggs for use, and at least one bunny…but it will depend on how much time I’ve got before I get called to duty at my aunt’s place.

In the meantime, you are, of course, always welcome to trek through the site and grab what you need for your blogs.

DOWNLOAD ALL THE FILES FROM THIS POST FROM FREE-3D-TEXTURES.COM

There is a set of 4 images of a yellow teapot, with three taken from different angles and one without the lid.  I started doing the same item from different views a while back when I discovered some of my files being used in “hidden object” games. While I thought that was pretty cool, I quickly realized they use the same file throughout the entire game, making it easy to find in other rooms. That got me thinking that the same object from different viewpoints might be useful since they could still use the same terms “yellow teapot”, for instance, but make it a little harder to recognize immediately.

All the new files can be found on page 4 of the Free PNG Section over at Free-3D-Textures.com.

There is one lonely little image file that I added this week – an older one I ran across in one of my folders. Most Canadians are probably aware the the Moose is often considered to be one of the north’s popular animals – particularly during hunting season. Well, this poor old fellow is pretty safe from hunters – at least the kind with guns. This guy is perched at the edge of a lakeside property just at the water and he sports Canada’s colours – white with a red maple leaf.

Anyone interested in texture and background files can visit the Textures Section to have a look at the new releases this week.

Filed under: photography, png files ]]> http://photographyofgrace.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/anyone-using-png-files/feed/ 0 graceystinson Feb26-NewPNGfiles Canadian Moose http://photographyofgrace.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/a-trip-through-the-interior/ http://photographyofgrace.wordpress.com/2010/02/17/a-trip-through-the-interior/#comments Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:09:34 +0000 J. Gracey http://photographyofgrace.wordpress.com/?p=408 ]]> We’ve had a bit of a tough week this time around.  My time was pretty limited since I spent a lot of it with my elderly Aunt.  She ended up being hospitalized this week, and neither her place nor the hospital allows me to spend time at the computer or in the studio.  So when life hands you lemons, you try to make some lemonade.  While I was at her place I used a little time taking some interior shots of her home to add to my “Interiors” collection.  I wasn’t well prepared for shooting indoors since I don’t carry around my lighting out of habit, but some of them aren’t bad, and she has an interesting home. Some of the shots I set aside to isolate for .png files and I haven’t been able to get around to that yet, but here’s a sneek-peek at some of the new stuff in the interiors section.

Along with these there’s a few photos added to some of the other sections, but on the whole my time has been spent elsewhere this week. In the “General” section is a set of antique ceramic/china canisters in blue and white (really “cream” as opposed to white) often referred to as “delft” – these indeed have a pattern of dutch girls on them. The thumbnail doesn’t show the complete set – there are two additional pieces visible in the larger photo. My Aunt has owned these as long as I can remember, so they’ve been in her possession for 50 years (give or take) and were purchased for her from an antique shop. My Aunt has always loved the delft ware and has collected it and other similar blue and white china since the early days of her marriage. It would probably take me 2 or 3 eight-hour days to photograph all of her pieces.

Also included in the general category is a fun little bit of graffiti – somewhat censored, but censored by it’s creator rather than by me. What you can’t see inthe thumbnail is the skateboard this poor guy fell off of. This is only one of the many pieces of artwork painted onto the concrete surfaces of a local skate park – many are little more than scribbles, but a few are pretty good. Of course, every year a couple of them get obliterated by the new skaters who paint over some of the older images.

There’s a few new files in the food category,  a new image in the birds section (cute little Hairy Woodpecker), a couple of new dogs in the pet section, and a couple of new landscapes as well. One of the new photos in the food section is this image of golden coloured pears and red apples in a cut glass bowl in a darkened kitchen. A little bit on the artsy side rather than pure stock, but it turned out rather well.

There’s the usual assortment of backgrounds and texture files this week as well. Because of my time limitations this week, many of the textures are from fabrics and textiles in my aunt’s home, and there’s a few new sets of bricks in the brick & stone textures, along with a couple of really nice rusted textures and a couple of abstract textures too.

On the home page you’ll find the featured “seasonal image” is a newly created and just released graphic for St. Patrick’s Day. I am hoping I’ll find enough time to create a few more before it actually arrives, so if you are a fan of St. Paddy’s then you might want to sport this graphic on your blog.

Some of the new photo files available on Free 3D Textures this week include a little bit of everything, from food to people and a lot of things in between. I ran across this photo of my daughter sitting in the window between portrait shots – a quick shot while she was looking out into the sunny day left the room in blackness with her silhouetted against the window. I don’t know why I didn’t process it before – I really like the feeling it emits. And then there’s a number of new shots of newspapers – I don’t know why, but the newspaper images are very popular, so I decided to add some new headlines to the collection…and speaking of collections, there’s a few new bits and pieces in the toy section – a child’s peddle car styled like an old Ford Model A (or maybe it’s a Model T, I’m not very good with cars), some vintage toys and teddies and a really cute playground dune buggy created from some scrap metal piples and recycled tires (for all the handyman dad’s out there). And for the big boys (and girls) in the transportation category is a restored 1966 Ford Mustang (must be Ford week).

In total there are 30 new image files in the free stock photo section, so have a look around at the various categories – most have something new since the last update.

There’s a couple of new files in the graphics section, and 10 new files in the PNG section – three different tomato images, some opened mail, a plate of orange slices, some vintage gloves and a few other things. If you are into textures or backgrounds there are 15 new files in the texture section, too.

One of my favourite images is this photo of a collection of vintage, antique and modern (mostly old stuff though) blue willow china. It’s displayed in an old kitchen cupboard – this piece is two individual pieces “married” to make one. The bottom half was an old jelly cupboard (circa 1850) and the top is a section from an old bake table. Although the focus of the photo is the china, I think part of it’s effectiveness is due to the cabinet it’s displayed in. While the photo itself isn’t the best quality (old camera with not much pixel depth) it remains one my favorites – there’s something about the way the china looks against the warm honey color of the cabinet and the background of old brick that is attractive.

Samples of some of the files: