A Heart's Cry...

For some reason, this week has been rather burdensome.  In fact, to put it bluntly, my heart feels as though it's been used as a punching bag.  Repeatedly.  Hard to handle when you've been hanging out on the mountaintop for such a long time.  I know that "mountaintop" experiences are monumental blessings from God and I also know that they are temporal.  We must go through the valleys in order to appreciate and learn and lean.  Lean, press into, squish up next to, and heavily snuggle into Him.  I think this is why my heart is so heavy this week.  I haven't done much of that.  I miss Him.  I need Him.  I think it's time to fix this.

What does this have to do with roses you may ask?  I came home today, was inflicted another blow to my already battered and bruised heart, when what do I see sitting on the kitchen table?  A dozen STUNNING, GORGEOUS roses!  One of my absolute favorite colors even; yellow, tipped in red.  Yes, yes, I know..... from my husband?  Roses that stand for "friendship blossoming into love"?  It's exactly what I needed.  His love, yes, but his friendship, acceptance, time, thought, effort, companionship; I needed his friendship more than anything today.  Not romance, not red roses.... these.  I really needed this at this moment in my life.

I am married to the most amazing man.  Not because he buys me roses, not because he helps do the dishes, not because he works so hard that I can stay home with our kids; yes, all these things are important and I cherish them greatly, BUT...   The reason I think he is the most amazing man ever???  He stayed.  He has committed to stay with me.  Always.  He has committed to love me, to seek God with his whole heart and stay.  It hasn't always been easy, in fact, there were many times I wasn't sure we'd even make it.  By God's grace, we have.  Greg has been faithful and he has stayed the course.  I am blessed.

Gorgeous roses, when my heart couldn't take anymore squeezing... a MAJOR added bonus :D

Aren't they AMAZING?!?!?!

Playing with a little texture...

Soft and Subtle..

I must say though, I think this is my favorite of the processed ones :)

Roses are....

in HDR!  (Look, stop shaking your heads and rolling your eyeballs at me, it's late ;)

Anyhoo, so I've been RAVING about my PSE9, here, here, and HERE.  :) Yep gonna do it again, lol!  Well, I took WAY too many pics of some roses that my daughter and I got for Valentine's Day, and this blog is  about a photograph of the ONE I got (along with a singing quartet :).  I was struggling with the uneven lighting and getting very frustrated.  Back lit petals are gorgeous but not when they are coupled with darkly lit centers, wah!

I decided to play with the AEB feature on my camera (somebody's gonna correct me here, I can just feel it).  I don't remember what it stands for but it's pretty cool.  You set the camera up for the exposure you want as a midline image, set the AEB and it will take  a total of 3 images at one time with 3 different exposure settings.  One is the image you set the camera to initially take, one is darker, and one is lighter.

I knew that I could do HDR (high dynamic range) shots (combining several shots with different exposures to bring out the best "part" of each image) with my PSE9.  So, I set my camera up on the tripod and messed around a little.  I processed my images from RAW, not adjusting any lighting for any of the original photos.  Went on Youtube for a little tutorial and had some fun.

Here are the original images....

 

Now, along with the HDR process, I used the cloning tool to get rid of the yellowish background at the top and the

CONTENT AWARE feature that is THE BOMB to get rid of the stem :D

If I haven't said it yet.......

I LOVE THIS PROGRAM!!!