Deck Garden

This farm house doesn't have a backyard or front yard like some homes. What is in front, or closest to the mailbox is not the entry to our home. The actual 'front' door hasn't been used as an entry in all the years we have lived here.

The deck, which is at the back of the house and closest to the creek, is where guests first come. This is where we spend time outdoors, have a table for meals, and enjoy most of our summer flowers. It is also where recently we put together a small fountain.

For Christmas I had been given the mechanics and a small copper butterfly to put together for a fountain but it needed a pool for the water to fall into and be recirculated. Very cool but we hadn't quite figured out what to use with it.

After trying several things, where the water bounced out of the fountain too quickly, we came up with an unused, old concrete birdbath. When I say came up, I mean I thought of it, and Farm Boss carried it around and positioned it; then we used rocks which had been tumbled by my parents from their rockhounding years, some chunks of sandstone from northern Arizona, and had new, pleasurable addition to our outdoor living.

This combined with another idea. Because of having so many good photographs especially this summer, I had been thinking again about a way to combine music and photos.

Picasa3, which I had recently downloaded (free) as a useful tool for transferring photos, turned out to also have a program to make movies. That sounded even more interesting when I saw it had an audio option for slide shows.

I know this probably isn't a big deal to others, but for me it was exciting. Several times I had looked at various software options to make slide shows combined with sound, but nothing seemed easy enough for my level of computer skills. The garden photos, that we had taken on Sunday, were a perfect opportunity to try this out. I downsized them to make for faster viewing but didn't try to put together a show to match sound.

Eventually, if I can find music to buy at a reasonable cost, I might try to do something with my landscape photos for YouTube as photo work is very enjoyable for me. So far the online sources for music have confused me. One wanted $20 for one song but then with unlimited use. It offered several arrangements but still wouldn't I get sick of one song for all photo combinations? Free ones required downloading software, and then I wondered are they really legal as they claim?

For my first attempt, since it's in my private album, I used music from one of our CDs. If you go to the video, pretend you are on our deck. The music is what you'd be likely to hear from the stereo inside. You will have to imagine the sounds of sheep maaing and cows mooing.

[Deck Garden]

Photos above were taken August 2 at the farm.