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Fulfil, my word for 2022
Another New Year has arrived and made me think about the previous year. Is there anything I’d like to change this year? Is there anything I could have done better? There is, of course, and I could start writing quite a long list with many items on it, but the one that speaks to me most has made it to be my word for this year, please give a big round of applause to the word FULFIL! You can plan, you can promise (to you or someone else) to make changes, you can muster whatever visions you’re able to come up with, but without completing the intended, you’ll never fulfil…
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My new bullet journal for 2022
Bullet journaling is a matter of love and hate for me. I love its style, flexibility and possibilities it offers… There are so many and you can adjust them all to your needs! …and I hate my inability to fulfil my expectations when it comes to the appearance of the journal. My drawings are not good enough, my writing does not look elegant enough, my imagination is soooo limited. Being a perfectionist does not help. And yet this method of keeping a planner makes me productive, creative and efficient and even when I ran away from it, screaming and swearing that it was too much to put up with, I…
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Inspiring food for thought #1
The other day I was listening to an audio English lesson on business English and I felt intrigued by its topic, which was dealing with difficult people. I had to think a lot about what was said because it felt genuinely true and applicable to our lives generally, not just to those professional ones. In a nutshell, the thing is that there are quite a few people in our jobs, in our neighbourhood and generally everywhere we find ourselves, which we find hard or almost impossible to put up with. We usually blame them and although in many cases we may be right, sometimes – and probably more often than…
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Assignment for using blending modes
I’ve been participating in a course on Photoshop recently and one of its sections focused on using blending modes. What I like about the course is that the last lesson of each section includes an assignment requiring usage of the techniques that were explained and practised in that particular section. Sometimes also photos and images are provided to make completion of the task easier. The theme assigned for using blending modes and relating techniques was defined as MYSTERY, and the following set of photos was provided as an inspiration or a part of the final image with the freedom to choose whatever other image needed. My first impression when seeing…
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By contrast
We encounter many contrasting places, objects, thoughts and people in our lives, some of them more prominent than others… In Giant Mountains, there are many nice old houses typical for the long-gone era of our ancestors. The houses look lovely and cosy, such as this one in Rokytnice nad Jizerou. In my opinion, there used to be different roofing material, this one looks too modern to me, but the house itself radiates the history. And it definitely shows a stark contrast to the contemporary houses in its surroundings. The new may not suit the old yet one day the new will become old as well and another level of contemporary…
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Learning to work with WordPress Block Editor
When WordPress team first introduced the new block editor, I panicked. I was quite happy with my WordPress blog and the way the original editor worked and switching to the block system seemed unnecessary and intimidating. Why the change? Fortunately for all of those unwilling, a plugin was offered featuring the older (classic) editor, so I had it activated and calmed down. After some time I thought I should give the new editor a try and created a post using it. Well, how to say that… The experience felt not quite awful but definitely unconvincing so I happily reactivated the classic editor… What was spoiling my happiness though was the…
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Lost beauty of old factories
You must have seen them. Old factory buildings that used to be full of machinery producing all sorts of goods but after the companies lost their success at the market, all that remains is emptiness and a state of gradual dilapidation. I came across one of those buildings during our holiday in Giant Mountains, in the town Rokytnice nad Jizerou. The building housed one of the textile factories of the company SEBA, a company that used to employ altogether more than four thousand people. The local textile industry did not survive all the changes happening in the ninetieth and many of the factories were abandoned. There were some plans to…
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Colouring folders in Lightroom
There are many ways how to organize your digital photos and the workflow of their editing… Long time ago I chose for organizing my photos that highly recommended system of creating folders for individual years and inside them folders for individual months and finally inside the months folders for particular days when the photos were taken. I had been faithful to this system for quite many years until some time ago when I decided to change that. On the one hand I had too many folders, some of them with just a few photos, on the other hand photos from the same place were scattered among several unrelating folders. As…
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Birds on the roof
When pictures tell their own stories, one should not interrupt them with unnecessary questions but should listen to their language rich in shapes, patterns and encounters. Shh… Can you hear this one?
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Rose inspiration
I have a small rose bush in my garden which burst into beautiful flowers this year. It made me feel inspired and willing to experiment with the photos where I captured it. You see, using textures in editing might have been fashionable a few years back, yet I believe that using a technique is not just a question of fashion, it is also a question of what you want to achieve and where you want to arrive. The texture I used and the photo I applied it to let me mold their expression to something that speaks to me. Although I am not generally a fan of bright colours and…
