I have been working on a new painting in Painter IX.5. I am painting this from scratch using a photo only for reference. I have made good progress, but I haven’t painted the stems on the apples yet nor have I figured out what to paint in place of the black background.

If you click on the picture, you’ll be taken to the gallery that contains some progressive images that illustrate the steps I took while painting this picture. I’ll be adding more as I work toward completion. Feel free to leave comments and suggestions. I’m striving for realism here, and I really don’t have much experience painting other than what I’ve figured out muddling around in my graphics programs.

I’ve got one picture in the gallery with my first option for a background, but I’m not sure it’s going to stay. If anyone has any suggestions for a background, feel free to leave me a comment.

In late April 2006, I got the opportunity to go to Portland, OR for a conference on Wetland Mitigation Banking. Yes, I know I’m a computer scientist…it was work related, trust me. (As a computer scientist I get to work on all sorts of project topics.) I haven’t completely finished going through all my photos, but I have a good start. Click on the thumbnail to be taken to a gallery where the pictures are. I’ll be adding more as I get them done.

The gallery contains photos from a field trip we took to a wetland banking site, Some random shots from downtown Portland, and photos from a visit to the Japanese Gardens.

If you’re wondering where my banner images came from…or if you would like to see the complete image: here’s the scoop.

The banner is made of three pictures that I took at various times. I combined them in photoshop and added the box effect. Below are links to the original images.

I’m finally getting around to processing some older pictures that have been sitting on my hard drive. These are from the Denver Aquarium. We went to Denver at the beginning of May 2006 for my company’s Engineering and Science Symposium. I didn’t have much free time, but they gave us one evening free. Some friends and I decided to go to the Aquarium there. We even ate dinner at the restaurant that was at the facility. I figured the food would be cheap touristy food, but it was actually a really good meal. Turns out, the restaurant was owned by the same people who own Landry’s Seafood restaurants. However, we got teased when we got back for eating fish at an aquarium.

Click the picture to be taken to the gallery.

My newest picture in my gallery was taken from my bedroom window. This little stump in the lake behind my apartment is a favorite perch for the egrets and the herons (Great Blue) that live around the lake. I would hazard to guess that 40% of all mornings will see one of these birds fishing or preening from this post.

I was excited to get this shot because I don’t often see the egrets. And when I do see them, they don’t usually stay this long. I watched this bird for atleast 10 minutes before I went to get my camera. He was preening and making himself more …