Of BIG annoyances with little things.......or is the problem REALLY big clumsy fingers.......? oh yes and a bit of digital trickery to boot!

Hiya Everyone!
Well folks...........THE new page is finished and uploaded as well as perfect as it ever will be until someone finds a mistake or typo!  I am referring to our new Patronal Festival. 

My title sadly refers to a temporary loss of poor Gracie's tambourine in one of my mad moments whilst trying to arrange or rearrange my scene.  The result is reallly something like that domino game that I love to watch.............ie: you knock one domino over and hey presto.........within a short while the whole lot have fallen down as the ripple effect carries down the whole chain.  However with THAT game the intention is meant!  With mine..................it is certainly NOT! I do NOT intend to knock one poor doll down........who is standing close to another who promptly falls over on cue too............and so it goes on...............let alone having other props fall off furniture and grounded pets fall over................

There I was.....................my scene was set..................well ALMOST!  I had managed against all odds to set Rev Ken on a chair and have him hold the guitar without dropping it, Ben was holding his shut hymn book and Tom had his obediently open at the right page.........and Gracie had finally agreed to stand up straight after her knee and hip joints kept pinging back to a sitting position..............arghhhhhhhh   But WHERE was her tambourine?  I had it a minute ago.......it was sitting on one of the pews!  Ah...........suddenly realised that, in my scramble to clear enough space to enable my big fat clumsy fingers to operate such a delicate scene I had picked up the said pew and carelessly dumped it in the entrance/bell tower area.  I was due to have a cup of tea and Andrew was beckoning me to it.  However he quickly realised I was NEVER going to sit still to drink my tea until said tambourine was located so joined in my search.  Initially I checked the whole floor of the church.....nothing.  So I checked the carpet just beneath the bell tower where I had uncermoniously dumped the said pew having forgotten its' precious cargo.  Nothing again.  I nearly gave up when I decided to fish under the little chest of drawers next to my part of the three seater settee.........BINGO!  There it was!  Sitting just under the curved bottom bit.  I sighed such a big sigh of relief on locating it - think Andrew did too!  Not sure HOW it managed to travel so far though.........that is the problem with little things.  They are so tiny that they can travel quite a distance so you can never rule out anywhere when looking for them although within reason of course.
I thought I had nearly lost Sepp the rat too.  She had been left perched on one of the steps of the bell tower but yes........I had also knocked her on to the floor.  I had the usual photograph hassles too though with my fancy new camera still preferring to focus at the silliest place......ie.......the background.  Never mind the fact that there is a doll virtually filling the lcd screen on the camera!

I thought I would again like to show you a couple of photos that didn't reach my new page.  I particulalrly love them for their atmosphere but they may appear a bit too dark in some people's browsers in order to be included on the site.  I took them using natural light which was late afternoon here by the time I had my poses set up. 

This photo is the first one and it is of Rev Ken holding his baby daughter together with Miss Enid.....  As you can see there is a bit of a cast on it so I did use Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 to do an automatic colour correction and the difference can be seen below.............

I am not sure which I like better........but in any case the difference is not that marked.

 However I took this one again with Gracie and Miss Enid with natural light and long shutter speed together with a manual focus and the cast is more obvious..................

The correction as above achieved with Photoshop Elements 3 is also more marked too than with the previous photo.  I think it comes down to preference WHICH is the "better" photo in each case.  Thank goodness for photo editing software.
Incidentally have you noticed something else in this picture.........................Grace's dress and Miss Enid's blouse are both made out of the same material!  It is a lovely antique material used by Jane Davies who made both dolls.

I am not sure if you all will have noticed but on our Games Afternoon page there is a digitally altered photo.   Bet you can't guess WHICH one it is?  Don't worry because I WILL tell you!  It is the picture with Esther and Grace standing next to the altar.  The shadow cast on the altar rail with the natural bulb looked very obvious and off-putting.  You can see the orginal photo below!

See how bad that shadow of the altar rail is.  I rectified it in my trusty Image Composer which came with my Frontpage 2000 software!  I managed to rid the photo of that shadow by simply cloning part of the unaffected wall and spriting out part of Esther's skirt so there was no obvious join.  I have used a similar techique to "repair" the duck beaks if the "broken now repaired" beaks look too bad on a photo. 

If you check through my site you may spot some obvious digitally altered photos.............my last year's Palm Sunday has one example.........visit it and see if you can find it.

Well I best leave you all now because I am having "fun" with Expression Web 3 trying to migrate St. Hils from Frontpage 2000 into it.  My ultimate desire is...............drop down menus along the top of every page for ease of reference to our visitors but I am still not quite "there"........but bear with me...........I WILL get there........well........sometime in the future with the aid of tutorial books and online tutorials and lessons showing me how to make use of CCS style sheets and more..........it WILL be done be assured!
Till the next time.