Treasure Seeker Tuesday #1

by Tish MacWebber | Oct 10, 2017 | Treasure Seeker Tuesdays

The unedited Tuesday Treasure Seeker photo, which I took myself, at King’s Landing.

Welcome to the first “Official” Treasure Seeker Tuesday!  I wrote it that way because there was a preview story a few weeks back when I was getting ready to launch this new category.  While I am still holding the reins and the keyboard, I thought it would be great to write about the Treasure Seekers (YOU!) and me.  We can start having adventures together while I am writing my books and working on this blog.

The first one involved thinking up a picture for this weekly category.  I am aiming to make it a weekly story, like Trust Your Gut Thursday, and Weekend Warrior.  I am hoping that it doesn’t become too much for me. Time will tell, as I am managing the blog commitments as best as I can so far, and the previous categories are still progressing. If I need to scale it back, it may be twice a month instead of every week, but we will see how it goes.

The struggle for finding the right picture for this category began with an online search for treasure, gems, treasure chest, maps, amongst other various thoughts and combinations.  While I was looking through many pictures and not finding what I wanted, I remembered that I had the picture I shared above.  It was taken at Kings Landing Historical Settlement a few years ago when I went for my first time.  It is quite the experience, to walk around, and see the farms and the people in costume playing the roles of people from our distant past.  We enjoyed our tour of some of the village and had a meal at The King’s Head Inn Restaurant before heading home.  It was the first time I tried Naughtea, which is a local honey mead made with green tea from Pollen Angels.  It is lovely.

Here are a few pics of my visit that day.

Now you can see where the inspiration for this picture came from.  I think that Kings Landing Historical Settlement is a gem, waiting for people to visit and take in the experience.  Now on to the “official” Treasure Seeker Tuesday business at hand.

I wanted to make a picture that invited the Treasure Seeker inside, to invite us to look for what lies beyond what is apparent in the picture.  This group and category are meant to be about more than meets the eye.  Not just the flash of the bling, but also about what really matters to us as a Tribe.  So when it came down to deciding on this, I reached out to friends and the “Official” Treasure Seekers Group on social media.

I am learning so much as I work on this blog.  I am not the type of creative that needs courses to prove what I can do.  I jump in, and likely because of the way I approach my projects, I feel like yelling and pulling out my hair sometimes, but I figure things out. Usually the hard way, first.  I am neither a photographer nor an editor, but I do the best I can.  Sometimes, people guide me to where I need to find the tools I need to accomplish what I need to do.  Other times, people pitch in and lend a helping hand.

That is what is so great about my whole blogging adventure.  I have friends that I know personally, and friends from around the world that are willing to help me out when I am stuck on something.  It humbles me when people open their hearts and minds to help me figure things out.  It also amazes me when a friend has the very answer I am seeking.  I treasure you all. (See what I did there?  I couldn’t help myself)!

There were a lot of attempts by myself to get this done.  I am now going to insert a slideshow of my own photo editing journey, then I will share the work of two friends that pitched in to help, crediting their work and sharing their online links for you to check out what else they are working on.

Here is my progression:

They are made with two different fonts.  I thought Great Vibes was a really pretty font.  I chose the other font, Lobster Two because it was a bolder font.  The Great Vibes was hard to read for some people, and the Lobster Two seemed to be easier for people to see on this pic.  I was then offered help.

Kirsty Allen, who hosted my first guest blog story, offered to give it a whirl.  You can find my introduction to that guest blog story here.  There is a link to the guest blog story at the end of my introduction story.  Kirsty is an author also.  You can find her blog, The Ramblings of a Madwoman with her writing and tips for other writers in this link.

Kirsty submitted two edited pictures for my review.

She used a different font, similar to the pretty Great Vibes I was working with, but it was even more elegant.  She also shared that she used, “…the wonders of Photoshop. Basically, I applied a filter in the second image, increased the contrast, and played around with the colour balance of the leaves to give them more of a blue saturation.”  I don’t understand what most of those terms mean, but I can see what they look like after she applied them.

Another friend, a former roommate Noa Price, also wanted to help.  She is living abroad now, and we were friends before and after we were roommates.  If she lived closer, I might be seeking her help out more often.  She is an artist, so she has a different background altogether.  She has studied her art in both New Brunswick, Canada, and also in Australia.  Her photo editing programs include adobe photoshop, but she shared that she prefers to use inkscape for illustrator and gimp for photoshop.  After a few trial runs, she sent her edited pictures for me to review.

Noa did some editing work on the original picture to fill in the hedge adjusted the colouring of it. In her words, “I changed it a bit leaving some of the path so people would “come in” and also made 70% opacity just behind the hedge so any text would be easily readable without losing the bush appearance. ”  You can see other examples of my friend Noa’s work at Noa Price’s Designs website.

After I carefully reviewed all of my options and considered the comments from social media gathered after this project, I made a final decision.  It was certainly a process, and as you can see, I am putting a lot of thought and effort into this picture, to get the correct one for this purpose.

This is the one I chose:

Noa Price 2

While I was working on this project, I played with different fonts.  Lobster Two seemed to be one I kept going back to.  Up to this point on my blog, I have used the font, Lora, with a tiny sprinkle of the font, Cabin Sketch.  I realized that Lobster Two really resembles my own personal handwriting style while working on this project, and I also really LOVE eating lobster.  It is my absolute favourite food on the planet, closely followed by chocolate and pizza.  So for me to see all of these things lining up, I have to go with my gut on this, and it is telling me that this will be the Treasure Seeker Tuesday picture moving forward.  Also, as I am building a new website, I think it is fair to expect a major font change on the new website.  At least until I find a chocolate or pizza font to mix in there. I hope that you agree with this picture as being the overall winner, and I look forward to writing in this category in the future.

If there are any topics or ideas that you would like to explore in a future Treasure Seeker Tuesday, please send me an e-mail or leave a comment below.  I can’t wait to see what we can discover together.