Cumulus: Challenges

One of my sisters and I play endless games of Word Twist on Facebook. We've played so many that the word jumbles are starting to repeat. But we play on anyway—it's a great way to relax the mind with a little mental challenge that has no consequences. I win, she wins, it doesn't matter. We start the next game… (I also play Scramble—a form of Boggle—on Facebook with my niece and she always wins. I used to be the Boggle champ in my family until I got old and creaky-brained and the next generation took over. The cycle of life, as it should be, yes? Someday her brain will get creaky and she'll have to get used to losing to the younger set.)

Another of my sisters and I like to challenge each other at Photoshop. One of us picks a photo and we play with it on Photoshop and then show each other what we each came up with. So far the challenges have all been old family photos that one or the other of us dug up somewhere and scanned into the computer. It's loads of fun and gives us both a chance to experiment with our photo editing software and learn what nifty new things we can do with it. Although most "serious" photographers decry the advent of digital technology, I think it provides a whole new medium of creative expression. And makes it available to anyone with enough money for a computer, a digital camera, and photo editing software. It's still not a completely democratic artform, since it does require expenditures beyond the reach of many on this planet. But it's a lot more accessible to a lot more people—like me—than the elaborate equipment needed in a darkroom and graphic art studio to create these sorts of effects. So I'm all for it! Here are our challenges so far (Sandy hasn't finished the 3rd one yet, so I'll post her results when I get them). You may need to click on the image to view it large enough to get the full effect:

CHALLENGE 1: