May 15 Garden Bloggers Bloom Day

This is from my mother, Melody

"Since I don't have a blog of my own, I asked my daughter, who is a photographer, to post these for me on her blog. This is just a few of the flowers that are blooming now in my North Florida, Zone 8, garden. Other flowers that are blooming are several types of salvias, Shasta daisies, verbascum, gaura, oakleaf hydrangeas. The regular hydrangeas and gardenias are just starting, and the roses (about 25 of them) are still going strong.

To see more great flower pictures from my gardens and other peoples gardens, visit her flickr page.

Thanks, Carol, for allowing me to join in the fun:) "
Melody

As always, please visit the May Dreams site to view other gardener's photographs and comment on thier luck with flowers.

For other photos that are for sale, please visit my my ebay shop. Please remember that any photo that you see on my flickr page can be purchased as well. Simply email me (mapetty@gmail.com) and I will get with you on the size and which photograph you would like.

For those of you in the North Florida and South Georgia area who would like photographs of your own garden, flowers, or family, I do natural light, on location shooting for a small fee. If interested, again, please email me and we can work out the details.

Long Time!

Wow, I got on to check my statistics today for my different websites and realized that it had been almost two weeks. That meant it had been the same for here! Not what I had in mind when I started this blog :( It was supposed to be a few times each week, not a couple of times a month!

Anyway, yesterday was the big day. My book, Hamilton County, Florida hit the shelves. The guy from the publisher, Arcadia Publishing is coming to town later this week to distribute books and set up sales areas around the county. I will let everyone know where the books will be locally, just as soon as I know. It can currently be ordered online at Books a Million, Amazon, and Arcadia Publishing. Everyone should at least take a look at it.

I have been doing some research for the Turn of the Century book. It will include Becky's house, along with several others. I am thinking that I might go ahead and self publish her section, because I know she is ready to see it all put together, and so am I. When I signed the contract with Arcadia, I kind of put Becky's stuff on hold, and she said she was ok with that because she wasn't paying for. But I'm ready to see that particular project to bed; I don't think I'm going to find the answers to some of the mysteries I have been trying to solve.

I have been doing some writing for another site lately. It is going pretty well. I turn in a batch of articles about once a week.

I am working on a photo project for blurb. They have the photography book now contest going on. One of my projects is Small Town Rodeo. I have a couple of others in my mind, but the rodeo one is what I'm working on now. I need to get my butt in gear, though, because the deadline is looming!

So let me know how things are going out there in blogland! Any ideas on future projects that I should work on? There are always plenty in my head, but you never know - I might decide I like yours better :)

Photochallenge.org - Paper, Day 117

Of course, everyone here knows that I haven't been posting a pic every day for the past 117 days. But yesterday at Photochallenge.org, the topic was paper, and I decided to give it a shot.

These are the promotional postcards that Arcadia Publishing sent me to help promote my book, which comes out on May 11 and can be ordered through the Arcadia website on my author page. You can't preorder it, but keep it in mind if your enjoy pictoral history books, or are interested in the Hamilton County, Florida area.

Anyway, these are my two submissions for the paper challenge.

Opening an Ebay Shop for my Photography

I have had several complaints about my shop on Etsy, mainly that it is not well enough known. Apparently, people are more comfortable sending their money to a company such as Ebay. And that's quite alright. I can understand that - there is a big difference between ebay and etsy, although I shop on both on a fairly regular basis. As many people are not as familiar with Etsy, I have decided to transfer my storefront over to ebay. When shopping for my photographs, which can be seen at Creating Character Photography, please use the ebay storefront. As I gain inventory for the ebay storefront, I will be deleting items from my etsy storefront, and in a few weeks, it will no longer be in existence. Please remember that all of my pictures that are shown on Flickr are for sale. So if you don't see what you are looking for right away in my shop, check out flickr or contact me and I can tell you if I have it. In some cases, I can even make special photos for those that are looking for an exact item or area.

Most of my photos can be bought in sizes 4x6, 8x10, 11x14, 24x30, 8x8, 10x10, or 12x12. Mats and frames are available for all of these sizes as well, for an additional fee. Please also remember that if you are in the North Florida or South Georgia region, I am available for natural light, on location photo shoots for you and your family in areas that mean something to you.

Looking forward to hearing from you all....

Interesting Site for Those That Use Digital Scrapbooking

I get a great number of emails from here and there, many of them listing opportunities to submit art or writing to various places. For those, I have my Google alerts set up to catch certain phrases while the Google spiders are crawling the web. As they come across those phrases, they send me an email with the link in it, so that I can check it out at my convenience. If you want more information on how to do that, let me know and I will help you out. This particular link came from my sister, who thought I might be interested in some free business cards. If you enter the contest, you can be one of three people who win a 1000 business cards of your choice. So I entered. But that's not what I'm really blogging about. :)

I don't know a whole lot about digital scrapbooking, because I tend to prefer the old fashioned way, but it seems as though this site has some pretty interesting interfaces and elements that you can use with a digital scrapbook site. One of the ones that I really liked was the fabrics. My family always makes fun of me because I take photographs of fabrics, for no apparent reason, but lookie here! This person has made a whole ton of them into backgrounds. Who would have thought? By all means, check out the whole site, called Think Design for some interesting ideas. I certainly found me a few. :)