通りすがりの音楽に　風が冷たくなるわけは
私の中の特別な気持ち　きみは知らないでいるから

言いかけてやめたことば
大切についた小さなうそ
おとなになっても難しいことは
思ってたよりたくさんある

どこまでも　どこまでも
近づけば遠くなるきみに
恋をした　それだけで
そらは広く深くなっていく

並んで歩いた帰り道　とりとめもなく続く雪
きみの哲学に触れるとき　いちばん好きな自分になる

春夏秋冬を繰り返し　いつの間にかひとまわり
めぐりめぐって訪れた　私のオリオン

手に入れるものじゃなくて
約束交わすことじゃなくて
それぞれに向かう場所が
似ていたらいいと思う

どこまでも　どこまでも
きみがきみでいる気高さが
嬉しくて　切なくて
もっとずっとそばにいたくて
恋をした　それだけで
そらは広く深くなっていく

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohhcXi-zbXU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM-LYsQw5pE

PS: 愛してる

I love Taiko no Tatsujin a lot. Yes, I love the drum game a lot. I was damn bored yesterday, and played it alone.. which is not that fun. I need to get more people playing these.

PS: Of course, the real machine is more fun than the PSP version =_=

not for sale

Teddy Bears, of course.

Before I move on, I would like to stress out one thing: You’re still reading a GUY’s blog. There’s no harm for guys to keep teddy bears. Me, I like plushies in general.

Only teddy bears featured in this post. My bed would be literally full if I place all of them on it. Yeah, all those Totoros and other furries, too many of them. I have weird interest. No! It’s not girly, it’s just.. “cute”. That’s all. There’s 10 of them in the picture.

More photos ahead

I don’t know when I started to like collecting em. Before this, I was in denial. Years ago, I told people that I’m not into this ‘girly’ stuff while secretly keeping em. Fuck that, I’m openly expressing my love for plushies now. ‘I LOVE PLUSHIES’.

You ask me, what’s so great about teddy bears. Well, lemme tell you.

“I DON’T KNOW”. I don’t know, I just like em. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s because they’re cute or maybe they’re just some random hidden female traits in my genes. Yeah, I like cute ones. I don’t collect ugly teddy bears ( unless people gave it to me ). No, I don’t name my teddy bears. I feel it’s too weird to name em, although I name my car, pc and other stuff. Not teddy bears.

Mai Favourite Plushie

That’s one favourite one. Ce-Yi gave me last year, it sits next to my monitor all the time where can I look at it all the time. I liek the quality of the bear, the fur is very soft. Isn’t it cute? Other than that, this bear carries a lot of sentimental value to me. I do bring this to bed at times lol. Highly molested by me, more than other bears. Why? Because it’s cute and nice.

Micloned

This is the smaller version of my favourite one. Ce-Yi found it in Dataran Pahlawan after dragging me into a plushie shop. I was kinda broke at that time.. but, darn. I can’t resist it. I can see a big imaginary “BUY ME XD” on it’s face. And yeah, I bought it on the spot. Yes, this love for teddy bears is bad at times.

Mai name ish BOB

My 2nd favourite bear. The only bear that I gave a name. I liek it because it’s BIG and cute at the same time. It’s hard to find big teddy bears which is cute. Girls luvs this bear a lot. Girls says that this teddy’s face is really cute. No, no one bought me this. I had to buy this myself. I don’t like the fur though, it’s not as nice as the above one. When you hug this bear, it feels… “cheap”. This bear is placed at the end of my bed.

There are times where I sexually abuse this bear. That’s very bad of me to do so. Lol, just kidding.

Normal

Another one of my favourite. There’s nothing special about this teddy bear. Khurshid gave me this for my 21st Birthday lasy year. It’s just special when…

Abnormal

… it wears a Kitsune-mimi ( fox ears ). This placed on top of my printer.

Other teddy bears are mostly given by someone else to me, weirdly, most of them are guys. No, they’re not gay and they don’t think I’m gay.

Maybe next time I should photograph all of my plushies. That’s going to be hard though, knowing em placed everywhere in the house and car, plus trying to fit em all on the bed.

PS: Hugs teddy
PPS: Again, you’re reading a GUY’s blog. Tch.

Making it Nice-er

Wow, I haven’t made any guides for a very long time now. Been optimizing a lot of my photos ever since I relaunched Fleinair. I’m going to leak one of my tricks this time.

This time, I’m going to show you how to make an object in the picture to give more impact, or “focused”. I used a flower for this example doesn’t mean it’s limited to flowers only. You can use it on anything that you think is suitable. Your taste, you’ll be the judge.

This trick requires Adobe Photoshop CS3 since it uses the non-destructive Adjustment Layers. Similar functions are available in pre-CS3 versions but.. it does changes directly to the images which is not so good.

It's good, but it can be better

I don’t remember where I took the photo but I knew it was quite recent. The picture above looks ok, but it can be better. Open it in Photoshop.

Masking

At times, you don’t wanna enhance the whole picture using the same setting. You will want to apply specific enhancements at specific parts if you wanna go for the best results. Well, if you don’t care and wanna go for a quick enhance, you can skip this part and move on to the next part.

Make sure you selected the Image layer. Now, click the Quick Mask button.

The Quick Mask Button. Click it!

Select the brush tool, make sure the foreground colour is black while the background is white. Now, start painting the part where you wanna select. It should appear like this:

Yep, it's red

Take your time. I know it’s quite hard using a mouse that’s why I use my graphic tablet ^_^;;

Now, click the Quick Mask button again. You’ll start to see the ‘marching ants’ showing part of the image has been selected. Here’s how it should look like:

Selected

The part where you paint just now are unselected. To select the part where you painted just now, choose the ‘Selection’ tool, right click on the image and choose ‘Select Inverse’. Since I wanna work with the background instead of the flower, I’ll leave it that way.

Adjustment Layers

While the selection is still active, go to the Layers panel and click on the ‘Create new Adjustment Layers’. From here, you can make non-destructive changes to your images because it acts as a filter and has it’s own layers. For pre-CS3 version, you need to use the Image > Adjustment option. :(

Create new Adjustment Layer

I like my images saturated, so I’ll add Hue/Saturation filter.

Saturation Settings

I choose Green channel and added it’s saturation level. Yeah, i know it’s TOO saturated lol. But it like it that way ^_^.

Results so far...

So far so good. Remember, set it to the way you wanted.

Now.. let’s make the flower more “outstanding”. Click the adjustment layer’s mask, right click and select ‘Add Layer Mask to Selection’ if you wanna use the same selected part as previous adjustments. Add another Adjustment layer and this time, choose ‘Curves’.

Curves

That might look ‘complicated’ but don’t worry, try to play around with it and you’ll do fine. I set my curves to make my flower background looks dark.

Darker Background

After that, I selected my flower and played around with curves again, but this time I intend to give the flower’s texture a bit more contrast. You can learn more about curves from here.

Vignetting

Vignetting gives your image a shadow border ( it gave the impression that the light didn’t fully fall on your camera’s sensor ). It can give the focus effect if done properly. While selecting your Image layer, Go to Filter > Distort > Lens Correction.

Find the Lens Correction Filter here

You’ll get a big dialog box. Just look for Vignetting controls and ignore the rest. Set the settings to your liking…

Vignetting Controls

..and you should be done!

Here’s my final image. It looks better than the original, right? Well, it looks better to me. There’s are lot of Adjustment Layer tools you can play around with to get more powerful results. Go ahead and experiment, get your desired results ^_^.

Final Image

Comment or ask any questions, I’ll try to answer:

PS: DAMN! Forgot to save the image. Now I have to do it all over again before uploading it to Fleinair. T_T
PS2: Noticed I liek taking pictures of flower? XD