For the two of you out there that reads my blog. I’m sorry. Yesterday didn’t play well with my life and prevented me from posting. It happens to the best of us.

So tonight I have a treat for you. I will show you how to make a quick background using a texture. I have made a few of these for my friends and they are always asking me how to make them.

The first thing you need to do is find a great texture. There are lots of great sites out there for textures. One of my favorites is Lost and Taken. There are also some groups on flickr. I get my best textures from my own library like the one using tonight, or from texture vault.

Open it in Photoshop

Find a Great Font and write out something great:

Save as a JPG and your good to go.

You can get the files I used here:
Background
Fonts

A few wall papers I have made for you:

GrapeSoda Photography Red Bolt wall paper – 1280×800

Jones Soda dark wall paper – 1280×800

Jones Soda light wall paper – 1280×800

GrapeSoda Photography wall paper – 1280×800

Next week and the weeks after I will continue a few more photoshop tutorials. I hope you enjoy them. If you want to know how to do something just let me know I will put something together.

Please note that Jones Soda there brand, name, likeness, coolness, and anything else they might decide they want or looks like it might be theirs, is theirs and not mine. I have not gotten their permission to use there name or anything else. Also these are my creations. Feel free to use them, share them and pretty much do what ever you want with them. Just don’t sell them. If your going to make money on these please send some of it back my way. Stealing is wrong and it hurts my feelings and just so you know if your wondering I am not selling these or making any money on them. Jones soda has not endorsed me or contacted me. I bet they don’t even know I exist. (If you guys want to endorse me I would love to promote you. You can always contact me if anyone has a problem with anything here at jeremy at mygrapesoda dot com)

Last night my wife and I watched a new show called, “The buried life.” It is about this group of guys that go around trying to do the 100 things they want to do before they die. With each thing they check off the list they help someone else do one of the things they want to do. You would think that this would be something you see on the life time channel. But you would be mistaken. It was on MTV. So what does this have to with photography?

It got me thinking about what I wanted to do before I died. I think that a line from Save Farris contains one of the greatest truths in the man psyche, “Deep in the heart of every man lies a hidden dream or plan to be a millionaire. Life with out a care.” I too suffer from this natural man belief. It is one of the largest thing I want to do before I die. But how to accomplish that. Well it would be amazing to do it writing. But I’m sure if it ever happens it will be through programming something. Who knows what that will be. But what about photography? this is a photography post right? It is the other 99 things I want to do in life. Almost all would be places I want to take pictures of or at. A few of them are places I want to get photo’s printed. Tonight’s post is about one of those. One of the things i want to do before I die is get one of my photo’s printed on a Jones Soda bottle. Tonight I start that dream. I will post my attempts over time and let you go vote on them to see if you can help me get printed. Now those of you that might know something about Jones Soda are thinking, “Cptn.J you know you can just pay to get them to send you a few bottles with what ever picture you want.” Yes I know this, but I want it to be on every store shelf across the US, Canada and anywhere else they might ship those lovely natural sugary goodness to.

So here it is. Attempt number one. Hope you enjoy it. Vote Here – Speedy doing the Robot.

When I decided that I wanted to write a new blog I had an idea of the design and functionality. I wanted it to be segregated into four distinct areas or sections. Those being, Life Style, Photography & Design, Genealogy, and Technology. So that I could have four really different groups of people reading here. But they really are my interests.

So I started poking around at other sites to find colors and a feel that I wanted to follow. In time I found a few blogs out there that I loved how they did things and a few designs that I liked. Next I started working on my design. But it just hasn’t come to me yet. I got the background and that is about it. Check it out. It isn’t much but there it is.

In my work I came across the worst sites of 2009 list. I have to say wow, I didn’t think people still did sites like these. Awesome… I want to get on this list some day, it would be fun

American Beauty Border Collie

So what is wrong with this? Nothing if you don’t mind that all your text is in images and you think floating penguins will help you sell border collies.

All Star Farm

LOL, you have to  be joking me. I hope that they didn’t pay a cent for this one. So funny