Day: April 2, 2024

One-To-Three Photo Processing Challenge — April, 2024

Fandango21 Comments

For this monthly prompt from Kate at XingfuMama, the idea is to pick a photo we want to play with and process it using three different methods.

Just FYI, all processed photos in this post were made using apps available for the iPhone at Apple’s App Store. Also, all images, including the original, were resized (shrunk) to make them quicker to load (and to take up less space in my WordPress media folder).

The photo I’m featuring this month is from this past St. Patrick’s Day dinner at our daughter’s husband’s parents’ home and it shows my place setting and full plate for a traditional Irish St. Patrick’s Day meal of corn beef, cabbage, potatoes, and carrots, along with a salad. Yummy.

Original Photo. I did change the name on the place marker from my real name to “Fandango.” No other changes made.

Processed using the Prisma app

Processed using the Distressed Fx app

Processed using the BeCasso app

Which image do you like best?

Judy’s Numbers Game — #15

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Judy Dykstra-Brown has come up with a new weekly prompt for the new year that she calls “The Numbers Game.” This week’s number is 136. To play along, we need to go to our media/photo file and type that number into the search bar. Then post a selection of the photos we find under that number and include a link to our blog in Judy’s Numbers Game blog of the week.

Here’s my collection of photos based upon “136.” All of the photos below have appeared in my blog posts. Some are photos posted by other bloggers as photo prompts. Some are screenshots or photos that I took. A few may have been generated by AI art apps, but most are photos I grabbed from free photo sources like Pixabay, Pexels, Pinterest, Unsplash, or Google photos.

Click on any photo to enlarge.

WDYS — The Anguish

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“I told him, Benny,” Alex said. “I told him not to open up a liquor store in the city. I told him that liquor stores get robbed all the time. Why didn’t he listen to me? I’m his oldest brother.”

“Mack always went his own way, Alex.” Benny said, “and you know how stubborn he always is.” Benny sighed. “Always was, I mean, always was.”

Alex leaned in and hugged his brother when he started crying again. “I know, I know, Benny. I can’t believe he’s gone, either.”

“I showed him an article that advised retail store owners to give the robbers whatever they asked for and not try to be heroes. That’s when he told me that he bought a shotgun and if anyone tried to rob his store they’d be hauled off to the morgue,” Benny said.

“He was a proud man,” Benny said, “a man who wasn’t afraid to be a hero. But what’s a shotgun going to do against two hopped-up thugs with semiautomatic rifles? And now it’s our brother who is in the morgue.”

The two men once again embraced.

Written for Sadje’s What Do You See prompt. Photo credit: Josue Escoto @ Unsplash.

Fandango’s Story Starter #143

Fandango3 Comments

It’s time for my weekly Story Starter prompt. Here’s how it works. Every Tuesday morning (my time), I’m going to give you a “teaser” sentence or sentence fragment and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a story (prose or poetry) around that sentence/fragment. It doesn’t have to be the first sentence in your story, and you don’t even have to use it in your post at all if you don’t want to. The purpose of the teaser is simply to spark your imagination and to get your storytelling juices flowing.

This week’s Story Starter teaser is:

“For once,” Quinn thought, “I wish I could get out of my own way.”

If you care to write and post a story built from this teaser, be sure to link back to this post and tag your post with #FSS. I would also encourage you to read and enjoy what your fellow bloggers do with their stories.

And most of all, have fun.

A2Z Challenge — The Letter B

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I am unofficially participating in this year’s A to Z Challenge. My theme this year is girlfriends.

B is for Barbara D.

I was about to walk into my house after school when I heard someone yell, “Hey!” I turned around to see a girl walking quickly towards me. When she reached me, she suck out her right hand and said, “Hi, Im Barbara, but my friends call me Barbie, like the doll.” then she held up a naked Barbie doll that she was carrying in her left hand.

Instinctively I shook her hand, said, “Hello,” and told her my name.

“I just moved into the house up the street and wanted to introduce myself,” she explained. “Do you want to play Barbies with me?”

I tried to figure out how old she was. I was taller, but she seemed to have more of a teenager’s body than that of most girls my own age, 11. She had light brown hair and brown eyes, and while describing her as pretty might have been a stretch, she wasn’t unattractive. “So, Barbies?” she asked. “I have a Ken doll if you want to play with him.”

“I don’t play with dolls.”

“Do you have a GI Joe doll?”

“GI Joe is an action figure, not a doll,” I said defensively.

“So bring GI Joe over and let’s see what kind of action he and Barbie can generate,” she said, a teasing smile on her face.

Barbara and I become very friendly and spent many hours playing “Barbies” over the next two years until her father, who was a real life GI Joe, got transferred to a different base and the family moved away.

Previous 2024 A2Z posts: A