no.  i’m not talking about a song by the offspring, or eggs for that matter.  it is very rare that i will discuss politics in the public eye.  in fact, i never thought i would, however, i feel like this may be an interesting topic, maybe even thought provoking.  my question is this - how can you have a government structure that is suppose to have a separation of church and state that also has all, or at least the majority, of voting precincts at churches?  for the life of me i just can’t wrap my mind around this.  question arise for me, such as 1) does being in a church give people guilt about what or who they are voting for 2) how do athiests feel about having to go to church to vote 3) is this even constitutional?

i think that if we are going to hold government voting within the walls of churches we should at least do it right.  say for instance you go to vote and your local precinct is a catholic church.  i say, instead of voting in the social hall go into the sanctuary.  you’ve now eliminated the need for voting booths.  just line everyone up in a line and they can vote in the confessional booth.  maybe if you vote at a protestant church you can get a communion wafer on your way out instead of a shiny sticker.

i know that i’m being a bit over dramatic about the situation, but i find it rather ironic the way our system works.  i’m not trying to offend anyone or change your mind, i just wanted to throw that out there as something to think about as we enter this campaign season.

with the image open, select the image tab on the menu and then adjustments.  from this drop-down menu, select the shadow/highlights option.  this will bring up a new dialog box in which you will be able to add and take away light.  make sure that the “preview” box is checked so that you will be able to see the outcome of your editing.  i like to show more options so that i can really tweak the settings to get the best effect.  the sliders are pretty self explainatory, so just play around with them until you get the effect you are hunting.  you can also tweak the color correction, to help bring back some of the natural colors that are lost from the original image.  when you are finished just click “ok” and you are done.  this is what i came up with.  hope you’ll be able to use this trick some time.

september has some big this to offer my friends, this year especially.  i like to think of september as the gateway to the fun season.  here are a few things that will be of highlight to me:

• ) i get to take a weeks vacation with my wife and get away from everthing

• ) the first day of fall begins

• ) the season premier of the office

• ) i will be wrapping up my first year at my new job - october begins year two

and as i said, being the gateway to the fun season means that halloween is right around the corner.  i better start planning on how i can scare little children.  halloween leads to thanksgiving, which leads to christmas.  its a triple threat of holiday bliss.  with september here, is there anything that you are looking forward to?

hey guy!  i’ve been waiting a couple of weeks for this day.  my new september wallpapers are up for all to use.  just go up to the wallpapers tab at the top of the page to use them.  this month we have a darker wallpaper about death, but it helps to remind that in death there is victory and a new beginning.  the other wallpaper is my tribute to apple computers.  i took some liberty in creating the new apple logo, kind of an evolution of sorts.  i hope you guys enjoy this month’s art.

first off, i am using photoshop cs3, so there may be a little discrepancy from the previous edition, but concept will be the same.  if its not already open, which it probably isn’t, you need to make the actions window visible.  to do this, go up to the menu and drop down the window tab and click on actions.  inside the action window you will see an icon that will allow you to create a new action, very similar to the create a new layer in the layers window.  select this option, which will open a new dialog box.  give the action a general name, or if you are working with a group of photos for the same project you can give it a job specific title.  when you have the name click “record.”  it is important to note that at this point everything you do will be recorded, so make sure you know exactly what you want to do before you click this.  once you have clicked record, you will notice the record icon has changed to red, just like on a vcr or tape recorder.  simply take your first photo and do whatever you need to do to it.  change the resolution, pixel dimension, coloring, etc until you have your finished product.  save the image in the appropriate format and in the appropriate place on your hard drive/desktop.  i like to close the image when i’m done with it so that every time i use the action it knows to close the document, which is just one less step i have to worry about.  once you have done everything you need to do hit the “stop” button in the actions window, which looks like any other square stop button you have ever seen on anything.  you are now ready to use your action.  with your next document open, all you have to do is click the “play” button and every step you recorded will be executed.

so the next time you have 25, 50, or even 100 items you need to edit identically in photoshop, use an action…better yet…take action.  most importantly - work smarter, not harder.

a creative team meeting took place at our house last night to go over the upcoming series for the rest of the year at ridgepoint church.  there are some big concepts that are going to take fruition and i’m excited to see how everything is going to pan out.  after last night, i no longer have to figure out how to make text look like real glass, which is kind of a plus.  i may still figure it out just as a challenge and to know that i could do it.  another thing that we all learned is that my cousin-in-law is a pretty smart dude.  actually, i’m pretty sure he could preach the first week of our next series.  this was his first time at a creative meeting and i know without a doubt he will be a regular on the panel.  now if i could just get him to start blogging…

in other news: • the olympics are over and i am finally getting to bed at a reasonable hour.  • i saw that there is a hurricane on its way.  i don’t think we are in its path yet, but if you live in florida you know that that can change at any time.   • there is less than a week until my september calendars are released.  i’m very excited about one, but am still taking requests for another one.  i will cut off requests at midnight on wednesday.