Unheavy Friday

Like you, I've spent a lot of time in recent years wondering what ever happened to Omar Sharif. Well, you never know what you'll learn at a birding festival. At the recent Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival, I found out what happened to Omar. He's running for office in South Texas.

His campaign staff needs to use their spell-checker before ordering signs.

I hope he won since it seems like he's not doing much in Hollywood anymore.

Happy Unheavy Friday!

Unheavy Friday

If this were one of those motivational business posters, the caption would probably read:
Every ascent has its perils.

I'd like to invite you, my creative bloggawkers, to contribute a caption for this photograph (forget the business/inspirational constraints).

Here's one to get you going:
"Dude! I can see your HOUSE from here!"

Got it? Fire at will.

Unheavy Friday

Black-bellied whistling-ducks at rest at Estero Llano Grande State Park near Weslaco, Texas.

I spent yesterday afternoon with a handful of friends, walking the trails at Estero Llano Grande and doing some casual birding and some even more casual bird photography. ELG is one of the World Birding Center sites in south Texas.

It's been a long, heavy-duty week, month, year. Time to kick back and have an Un-heavy Friday to start the weekend. And I wish that very thing for you.

Unheavy Friday!

Hey, it's Unheavy Friday again!

Here are some images from Brazil to chill you out for the weekend:

Moon over old church, Ubatuba, Brazil.

Sunset over the Atlantic Ocean south of Ubatuba.


A spiderweb that looked just like an old LP record, floating above the forest floor.


An orchid growing on the edge of the forest at Folha Seca.

Have a good weekend, amigos! Catch you on the other side!—BOTB

The Best of Photo Booth

This is an Unheavy Friday Post. What I mean by that is this: It's Friday. We don't need any more heaviness. It's a miracle that we made it through the work week, right? Thus, Unheavy Friday.


If you are the owner/user of a recent-vintage Apple Macintosh computer you may (or may not) be aware that there's a free program inside your computer that will make you waste hours of your time and will hog up entire gigabytes of your hard drive space.

It's called Photo Booth.

The Photo Booth window on my Mac.

Photo Booth uses the camera built into your computer to take photos of you or whatever is in the camera's field of view. Simple enough, right? Here's a photo of me, right now, working hard on this blog post at my desk.

Normal-ish photo.

Black-and-white, always classic.

But Photo Booth also comes with two sets of cool effects and that's where the Devil lives. You can morph yourself (and any body part you care to photograph) into amazingly weird shapes. My kids love to mess with Photo Booth almost as much as I do.

Here are some recent photos.

As if ONE Liam weren't enough...

Things always start off fairly mildly. Then they deteriorate from there...

Here is the second, wilder set of effects:

So many options. I'm still looking for the New Hairline effect.

The light tunnel effect.

Those are Liam's real teeth.

The kids took these images while we were stranded in the JetBlue terminal at JFK airport in June. They were laughing so hard at the photos that people started staring, then gathering around. Liam, especially, loved having the crowd. Everything was OK until his images began getting very butt-centric, then it was time to shut things down.

Phoebe has a huge brain.

Three-quarters of a family portrait.

Happy siblings.

Eureka!

Mamaw Phoebe.

Triclops Liam.

Alien Liam.

STOP TAKING PICTURES ON MY MAC!

This is how we save money on eyeglasses.

And this, too.

Chet Baker even gets into it, too.

I hope I haven't freaked you all the way out. Happy UnHeavy Friday!