And now... for something completely different...

I find that I'm really enjoying exploring all kinds of photo creation and photo manipulation. In the following image, it started out with what I felt was a very distracting background of multiple jewel tone colors. Using the Gimp and Layers, I made a Palladium toned B&W layer and erased anything that represented color that would show through from a lower layer in the image stack.

I like this technique and will be experimenting with various images and styles and tone combinations to see where this might lead.