Saturday's Photo Scavengar Hunt - COOKING/COOKED

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This weeks theme is COOKED/COOKING.

You know these are not the most wonderful pictures in the world but it brings back a good memory so I thought I would share. Back a few years ago I was part of the annual Woldumar chili cook-off and sleigh ride. The basics are to raise funds for the Woldumar Nature Center by charging a small fee. In return you get to sample a lot of chili and even go for a sleigh ride to boot. So now let me take you behind the scenes of the cook-off with the event already in progress...
I think someone could have used a slice and dice machine. That was a lot of work to get all the ingredients all prepared.

More than a few cans were opened and, despite how busy everyone was and how everyone was trying to win, you could always count on someone to lend you an ear or even a hand. Yep, the general public missed the best part of the cook-off for sure.

So when you run out of burners in the kitchen because of how many cooks there are, what do you do? Improvise!


Speaking of full kitchen, here is the stove with enough chili cooking to feed an army.


And here is the results of the cook-off.


Actually the ultimate winners were the nature center, the crew that put the chili together and put the event on, and the people that got to sample a little chili and have something fun to do and a cold winters night.

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Saturday's Photo Scavengar Hunt - FIVE

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This weeks theme is FIVE.

Every year in July we have a golf outing. There is about 72 people that play. First place gets trophies and probably a nice sum of money. Second and Third place get lesser amounts of money. Forth, Fifth and more place teams get to pick from a pool of prizes. But last place, last place gets a trophy, the coveted last place trophy. My team has taken it I think 7 out of the last 8 years. The team you see here snuck in and took last place from us one year.

Anyway here you see the picture I submit for the hunt this week which contains FIVE players. They decided to make a pyramid with their team, and part of the team in front of them. I was elected to take the pictures.


And now one supporting picture in which you see the mostly completed pyramid. For some reason the team in back of us got pissed off, go figure. Normally we are not that crazy but the course was slow, the beer was flowing and ... lets just say bad combination.


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Saturday's Photo Scavengar Hunt - STEPS

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This weeks theme is STEPS.

This seems like the perfect picture for the hunt today. Sorry I have been away for a few weeks. This picture shows a beautiful winding staircase with lots of steps. I am sure this reception hall gets rented a lot just for the stairs and a picture like this although much better than I did. This is Brother and his wife back in October of 2000.


You know when you think about it this picture also applies in that getting marrieds is taking a big step in ones life.


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Saturday's Photo Scavengar Hunt - EMPTY

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This weeks theme is EMPTY.

I wondered if I would ever get to use these pictures. What you see here is a small series of photots that show the abandon EMPTY vault of a former bank. You will notice the EMPTY safety deposit boxes. Believe me they were EMPTY, I checked. I had the pleasure having my office moved for a few weeks into a former bank. One of the treasures was this old bank vault.






Not everyday you see a bank vault or at least not every day you can take pictures of one.


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Saturday's Photo Scavengar Hunt - DRINK

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This weeks theme is DRINK.

In keeping with my looking for a twist for the weeks theme, have you ever heard the phrase, she is a tall “drink” of water? Well I did a little research on this and there seems to be a bit of variation on it. The thing that people seem to agree with most often was that it is talking about a tall thin woman.

With that let me present to you a few pictures of one of our members of the Michigan State University women’s basketball team. Allyssa DeHaan is a freshman and she is an impressive 6' 9" tall. I think if you were able to find “Tall Drink of Water” in a dictionary you would see a picture of Allyssa.


I have never meet Allyssa in person but the day I did go to one of their games with my camera she caught my attention right away. It is not surprising as Allyssa stands a full 6 inches about any one of her team mates. That and she seemed to be a real super person. She was not all full of herself like she could be. She seemed to get along well with her team mates. I also found several articles like this one that enforced my opinion of her. Anyway if you were interested here is a link with information about Allyssa.





This last one I thought I would toss in for fun. The person on the left you see with the light green shirt collar is their coach. In real life she is probably slightly shorter then normal. Here she looks really short standing near Allyssa.



Thank you very much for visiting. Have a wonderful weekend and Happy St Patrick's Day should you be so inclined.

Saturday's Photo Scavengar Hunt - ARCHITECTURE

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This weeks theme is ARCHITECTURE.

Last year, late summer/early fall I decided to head over to the State of Michigan Capitol. I forgot about these pictures and was thinking of skipping this week, instead I am posting real late.

Here are a series of pictures of the Capitol. The architect was Elijah E. Meijer. Construction of the Capitol was completed in 1879. These pictures do not do it justice. I need to go back and take some more pictures when spring gets here and stitch them together into a panorama since I do not have a wide angle lens.








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Saturday's Photo Scavengar Hunt - SOFT

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This weeks theme is SOFT.

OK, lets give this a try one more time. This week I thought I would take a picture I took in 2003 at an event that is part of the Kentucky Derby Festival of a Mom and her daughter. It is not a perfect picture but it is nice.



Now we all know that babies are SOFT so I suppose you could call this SOFT in its own right but that is not where I am heading. I am reading a book called "The Photoshop CS2 book for Digital Photographers" by my favorite photo retouching author, Scott Kelby. In it one of the techniques that he shows you how to do is turn any photo into a SOFT focus photo. I thought this week I would do that with this picture.

Step one after the open the picture is to copy the photo into another layer. With CS2 you press Ctrl-J but I would imagine you can do the same sort of thing with other programs. Now you apply a blur to that copied layer. In CS2 you select Filter and then Blur and finally Gaussian Blur. For High Res pictures you type 20 pixel. For Lower Res pictures you select between 6 and 10 pixel. This is what you end up with:



Now the final step you need to adjust the opacity of the new layer from 100 percent down to something much lower so the details show through. Scott suggests 50 percent and that is what I did here.



Ah now that is nice as it has added a nice SOFT focus to the picture. And that is my entry for this weeks theme ... SOFT. Oh and sorry for plugging the book and the Author but I thought if I am going to reveal one of his tips then it was the least I could do suppling links to his stuff in case you wanted to check him out.

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Saturday's Photo Scavengar Hunt - ANTIQUE

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This weeks theme is ANTIQUE.

Well time to cheat a little on this one. I have some things that are older but I do not think I have anything that is ANTIQUE. Now I suppose I could turn the camera around and take a picture of me. I mean I am going to be 50 later this year and from what I read on the WEB they are starting to consider things that are 50 years old an ANTIQUE. Sorry, could not do it.

I also posted that 1980's car bag phone. Now age wise that the phone is not ANTIQUE but you have to admit it, yes that would qualify. But I already posted this before for the hunt so scratch that one.

While I was doing my research on the WEB I found this preview of an O'Reilly Safari book - Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 4: 50 Ways to Create Cool Pictures. The preview shows you how to use Adobe Photoshop to create an ANTIQUE affect on a photo you may have. So for this weeks hunt entry I will be ANTIQUING a photo before your very eyes.

Lets start with this picture I took 3 years ago.



Now play with the Hue/Saturation numbers per the article and you end up with this. I believe what you are doing here is kind of fading the color and provide that kind of yellowish tint that an ANTIQUE picture typically has.



And now do the last step and you have this. This seems to kind of add a lot of grain to the picture to kind of make it look like it has deteriorated some.



Sorry for the cheat but this is a picture I took and it truly does look ANTIQUE. Imagine what you could do with a picture that looks like it could actually be ANTIQUE to begin with. I hope you find this interesting and something you may find useful in the future. I think I will have to check into this book to see if they have the updated version 5 book or if the version 4 book is still available. I wonder what other cool things they have to share?


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Saturday's Photo Scavengar Hunt - BROKEN

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This weeks theme is BROKEN.

I looked every where and I can not find it. A few weeks ago I took a bunch of pictures of my niece and her team playing basketball. At it I took notice of something and decided to take pictures of it. It showed a list of athlete names, event and record that they set. I remember that from back in high school. Your name appears on the wall until such time as your record is BROKEN. Then the new name is posted there and so on, and so on.

Now here it the thing. I can not find those discs. I was going to call up the brother in law that I know has a copy of it but he is in pain trying to pass a kidney stone. Somehow I just do not think I can bother him now. So we will have to do with something from last weekend. It only shows the years that their various teams BROKE everyones record and became the best team for that year. This really is not what I wanted to post but I will just have to be lame this time.



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Saturday's Photo Scavengar Hunt - GROSS

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This weeks theme is GROSS.

First lets look up one of the definitions of GROSS.

pl. gross. (Abbr. gr. or gro.) A group of 144 items; 12 dozen.

Here we have a GROSS of toothpicks.




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Saturday's Photo Scavengar Hunt - SILVER

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This weeks theme is SILVER.

This week will be short and sweet. I thought of taking a closeup of my hair. I do not have a ton of grey (or is the SILVER) hair in there but there are some. We could have done coins. Several of my pieces of electronics are silver colored also but somehow none of that seemed to work. Until I came up with an idea.

A long time ago there was a beer that developed a bit of a nick name. Now there were neon signs and mirror signs that included the nickname but now a days it seems to all but be forgotten but I still remember.


The above is a pictures of a can of Coors Light beer. Now you might say yes, there is the SILVER for this weeks theme but actually that is not what it was all about. The nickname "The SILVER Bullet" is what I am presenting as my take on the theme for this week.

Here are One, Two, Three seperate links about Coors Light SILVER Bullet. Now I think I should go partake in this weeks theme by opening said exhibit and ...


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Saturday's Photo Scavengar Hunt - TECHNOLOGY

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This weeks theme is TECHNOLOGY.

First the picture I am entering for this week I did not take. Sorry, I knew what I wanted to post but I could not find it in my small library. So forgive me, this is the first time I have done this. I promise to replace it and post it in the future when I am able to take one.

Now I have three pictures way down below. The first one I did not take. The next two I did. If you want you can skip this long story and go right to the end to see the pictures.

I have been on this earth for a lot of years. During this time I have seen TECHNOLOGY really change. Televisions started out in black and white and not everyone owned one. Most people, if they did own one, only had one and it was a piece of furniture. A little later the color TV came along and very few could afford them. They were still pretty bulky too. Tubes disappeared, they got smaller and more affordable, they became flat, higher resolution and weigh a lot less.

Telephones where rotary dial phones. It took 30 seconds or more to dial a number. They were good size but built solid (I know, my parents still have two). After a while they went touch tone, they got smaller and became wireless. Then they became car phones, then bag phones and much smaller cell phones of today. You could even take that one step further and mention Satalite phones. Somewhere in there they added lots of features like memory, voice dial, camera phone, organizer, and I am sure much more.

Television reception was over the air. You received ABC, CBS, NBC. Where I lived we received CBC too since I grew up near Canada. Eventually PBS began to spread. Then came cable TV. I think we could get 13 channels or was that 26. It might have been a wired remote too. Eventually you could get much more channels and then cable went digital. At the same time services started to be offered over cable such as Internet and dial tone. Then came along those big dishes and satalite TV was born. They were the size of a small car but you could get all kinds of stuff. Then the dish started to be a mesh allowing light and more important wind to pass through. They 18 inch dishes were born,

Cameras have went from being black and white film, to color film, to advanced color film, and finally to digital. The digital went from under a mega pixel and not very good to cameras with over 12 mega pixel that can out perform film cameras. In there we had 8m video camera that went to VHS and digital. Betmax was invented, VHS, and DVDs. Albums were 78s, followed by 33 1/3, cassette, 8 track, CD, and MP3.

I have went on way to long. So here is my picture for TECHNOLOGY.

This is a picture of fire. You may ask how this is TECHNOLOGY? Go ahead, I'll wait. Well, thinking back to cave man times fire was a most important technology. That and the wheel and maybe the club.


OK, since I did not take that picture, let me add a couple I did take. This first picture is my first cell phone. It is a bag phone. I was happy I had it but it was not very practical.



I had a few other cell phones in there and here is my present day cell phone. Now I know there are much more advanced cell phones than what I have pictured here.




Thank you very much for visiting. I should be able to start visiting again once Wednesday is over and work is a lot less demanding on me. Have a great weekend and a better week.