This is Joe (left) and Montez (right), two of my students who graduated in June. On Saturday night about 8pm, Joe was sitting in his home a few feet away from his girlfriend and one-year old daughter when two unknown men looked through a window and fired eleven shots into the house, hitting him three times and killing him. He was 18 years old. I found out about this when I read it in the paper on Sunday morning.  While in the back of my head, I know that something like this happening to one of my students is a distinct possibility, it doesn’t prepare me for opening up the paper and seeing it in print. You see, I work at a school that really is the last resort for some students. For whatever reason, be it the inability to function in their zoned school, or they have gotten in trouble with the law outside of school, they end up with me. In Joe’s case, he and a fellow student had gotten into a fight and both of them were in my class. They had no problems with each other while with me. Boys will be boys and once the fight was over, it was over. I am under no illusions about my students. I know that some are involved with gangs, drugs, and criminal activity. I don’t judge, I just try to work with them as best as I can and as much as they will let me. I don’t know what Joe was into, or not, but what I do remember about Joe was that he loved his little girl very much, and spoke about her with the pride that only a parent can. On the day he graduated, he smiled from the time he got to the Convention Center until the last minute I saw him. He picked up his little girl and said, “Look at Daddy’s diploma.” It was such an achievement for him, it’s an achievement for anyone, but for some reason, I like to think that despite the odds that ‘my boys’ had against them, these two graduated. Neither one of them were angels, far from it, but for one hour under a hot Florida sun, these two, along with 100 others were like any other high school graduate in our county, proud of their accomplishment and looking toward the future.

I am a little late this week, but I took this photo last night (Friday) at a football game. This little girl stood there the whole time watching for her brother.

Original:

My two fixes

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This week’s challenge at I Heart Faces is Beach Fun. While the bride isn’t exactly splashing around in the surf, she was having a wonderful time! For more Beach Fun photos… click the button.

Original:

And here are my ‘fixes’.

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This child has probably half a dozen pairs of shades. These are her favorites and fit in just right with this week’s them over at I Heart Faces. I love this shot mainly because she wasn’t posing. I called her name and she turned to look at me. For more Shady photos, click on the button.

Here’s the original.

Any my first ‘fix’. I cropped the photo to only include the boy and added Florabella Luxe Textures in Allure

For the second photo, I also cropped the photo and added Coffeeshop Rita’s Vanilla Haze action. I changed the layer from ‘normal’ to ‘overlay’ and brought the opacity down to 75%

For more Fix it Fun, head on over to I Heart Faces.

I recently came across a FABULOUS photography site called Love that Shot! Today they announced that they would be setting up a linky so we could share our photos. This isn’t a photo that I took this week, but it is one I’ve taken over the last three weeks. This is a parking meter downtown and I loved the Expired tag on it. Post processing, I edited in Photoshop Elements 8 and added an action called Drama. I can’t remember where I got the action, but I will try to find a link. I love how the action gave it a vintage, moody quality. I shot this on manual mode with a focal length at 55mm. I cropped it down from the original to get rid of cars in the background as well. I do need to get better at figuring out settings so I can give a better description of what I did! For more fabulous photos click HERE! (for some reason, I can’t the Love that Shot button to work on my site)

This week’s theme is Surprise! I took a little bit of a different approach to this challenge. I took this photo last fall when we got Bacchus. We had taken him outside and Amanda decided to get in the grass so I could get some shots of her. Well, Bacchus wanted in on the action and took a running start and pounced on her! She giggled and rolled around in the grass for a while with him and I got some cute shots. This one was one of the first that I took when he jumped on her. When he jumped on her, her sunglasses fell down on her face and I snapped away. For more Surprises, go take a look at I Heart Faces.