NKM photos: birds

Another week has gone by and another fabulous texture found its way to my collection by way of Kim Klassen's Texture Tuesday email. This time I have two pictures that I think work well with this new texture called Dream.
The first picture is of a Seagull, which I had already been working on with other textures. The dream texture just seemed like the icing on the cake. Hmmm, cake. Sorry, I got temporarily distracted. Speaking of cake, I made some yummy cake pops this weekend. You can see pictures and how-to's on my personal blog (not that this blog isn't personal, but more photography oriented, where my personal blog is, well...personal, you know?)
Anyway, back to textures. Here is the Seagull--if you hover your mouse over the picture, you'll see the original.

Here is a screen-shot of the layers and settings for this image. I used the dream and grannyscupboard textures as well as a lovely overlay from Vera Lim:
Seagull layers

And 'cause it was so much fun, I had to do another one. What do you think?

I was going to put the layer screen-shot here as well, but it turned out to be quite long. Let me know in your comments if you'd like to see it and I'll try to stitch it together from multiple screen-shots.
Make sure you stop by the Texture Tuesday Page and check out all the beautiful entries.

Lately, I started taking my camera on my walk around the office building after lunch, mainly to get more familiar with the new camera and the new lens, a Tamron AF 70-300 Macro Zoom (sweet). So, every day I try to look for something new and interesting to shoot. Yesterday, as soon as I stepped outside, I heard birds chirping nearby and started to look around. Sure enough, one bird (don't ask what kind because I have no idea, decided to take a break right in front of us. I think he (she?) was talking to another bird and didn't want to chirp and fly :)

I really like this lens. It does a fantastic job of capturing the subject and the resulting DOF and bokeh are great! I used to have to do some creative adjusting in Photoshop to get the DOF even close to what I'm getting now, which saves me a ton of post-processing time. That, combined with some really cool (and extremely useful) actions I got from the Pioneer Woman and CoffeeShop sites, gives me more time to work on the fun stuff, like adding textures.