What do you have as a background on your computer screen?

I guess I am wondering if I would be well served to have something different on my computer screen. You all tend to come up with inspirational messages and pictures, and I thought it might be interesting to find out what some people use as backgrounds, or screensavers.

I just use one of the generic screensavers, that looks like stars coming out of a point, or something.

The background I use is generally a picture I have taken somewhere that is pretty or interesting. Currently it is of a black, rocky beach on the Olympic peninsula, but recently I have used koi fish, and a picture taken at Coral Castle.

With another computer I had, I was able to do a slideshow of my pictures as a screensaver, but as far as I know I don't have that option available now. If there is some sly way of doing that without my old Adobe program, someone please tell me.

Here's the picture I am currently using. I think I am ready for a change, or at least a new screensaver. I was just wondering what the creative and enlightened people here are using. :o



After Lildreamer's post, I thought, hmmm, maybe in my screensaver or on my computer screen I could use something about trusting the universe, since I tend to forget that.

In any case, changing screensavers and backgrounds is a cheap, easy way to redecorate.

I took this while the light to changed and I had to start driving. I liked how it turned out. In the upper right hand side there's sort of an ohm symbol, the lower portion sort has saxophones dancing around.

Along with my desktop pic, I ran a screen saver that has a liquidity appearance to it, I have that set to blues, greens, and purples. It flows and swirls across the screen like a pool of gasoline.







I like your pic of the Olympic peninsula.

Do you live up there??? I've visited a couple of times the Pacific NW, and I always feel like I'm home. I :loveya: it there.

I can see why you use that. Thanks.

Anyway, to answer your question, no, I don't live there, but my daughter is there, and I took the picture on a visit. I like the picture too, but I also like to change the background on my computer every few months.

Describes the feeling of Austin at night... the "music capitol". Trying to figure out where you were when you took it......Cesar Chavez (1st St.)?

Here's my favorite photo of Austin, albeit rather traditional.

We were down for the SXSW expo and we were on our way to an EFF party that was being held at a lodge. The party had robots that the geeks brought down to show off. One of the robots maker/owner is a DUer.

check out the preview of the members gallery and the free gallery too. I currently have 'summer wood' from the free gallery.

I change mine pretty regularly according to what's going on in my life. If I need inspiration or am focusing on something or someone, that will dictate what I choose. I have a lot of nature shots and art that I like. You all have seen many of them in my posts here. I posted my current screensaver in my latest post - it's centering, peaceful and a gentle reminder to stay on my path - to offset the current inertia or frustrations. It's one of my "Ommmmmmm" images. So my screensavers are like a daily meditation or reminder.

don't stay there long enough to look at any photo.

what our home page looks like (NASA's Astrology Picture of the Day) or some silly thing I have seen here on DU. Currently, we have a pic of M51: Cosmic Whirlpool up. Original link: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080105.html Having the Astrology Pic of the Day as the first thing we see in the morning helps with our perspective. We are all star dust.

http://hinoto2007.multiply.com/photos/album/44/Golden_Tarot_of_Botticelli#74

I am working to manifest some better housing so when I was shuffling the deck one day and this card popped out I took it as a good omen and use it as a focus.

and the 10 of pentacles is the Italian Villa...lol!

I don't think I would want one even if publishers clearning house showed up tomorrow with the big giant check. I prefer privacy and wouldn't want to have a house so big I needed a cleanup crew just to maintain my McMansion. No give me a nice house on few acres of land and a picture window for my furkids to watch Bird & Squirrel TV and we will be in our idea of a mansion!

I would insist on more flowers in the front yard tho!

NASA has a lot of great pictures, don't they?

A bit outdated (by 3 1/2 years) so I may have to update it soon. I think I'll keep the subjects, though. :D

that I'm manifesting

:hi:

I took this picture this summer; it is a photo of my backyard at sunset.

http://mssu.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=498979&l=8191d&id=504552540

That's all it is. Navy blue. It's pretty.

I really like this graphic.

Interesting choices (I knew it). I really just couldn't make up my mind, and thinking out loud here helped. On the screensaver options I only found a way to use the entire My Pictures for a slideshow. But I just got a free download of Google Photo Screensaver from Google Pack, and I am going to try making a folder of some of my pictures and some inspirational ones so that at least my screensaver will be varied. So family photos, vacation photos, pictures with meaning, will all be flashing on my screensaver. I think I was missing that feature of my hold software. Then I can just switch out my background every month or so.

Anyway I didn't even think to look for freeware like this until I posted. Duh, me.

The digital camera my sis gave our Mom came with software that won't work on my pc so I tried Picasa and like it :)

I love your pic. Great depth.

..for the past few years I've used the Fractal Arts screen saver >
http://www.fractalarts.com/SFDA/screensavers.html

Desktop has been a fractal of some sort. I change it from time to time. This is current >



I have used wildlife photogs too. I had this one for a long time because it reminded me of a lucid dream I had >

They are just fascinating.

I never get tired of looking at them.

Yours is beautiful; love those gold tones.

I have this one in my collection of current favorites.



Ooh, and here's another.

Don't you love 'em? In the one on my desktop, I imagine I can see Infinity.
I can't find my first favorite fractal site (I'm still looking), but here's a very nice one >

http://www.sgeier.net/fractals/

Hey, and welcome to DU and ASAH. Don't know if we've welcomed you yet.
:hi:

we spent several summer vacations at a lovely beach town in SC. I have a sunset marsh photo that I pulled from a website as a background, because it reminds me of that place. Sometimes, in the winter, I go to the real estate companies and do the virtual tour of the houses on the beach, just to see the ocean. :)

For screensavers, I almost always do photos of the family, from whatever recent event got photographed. Right now it's Christmas photos, but soon I will take some shots of my son sledding or something, just to switch it up.

For a while last summer, though, I was feeling so stalled and stymied at every turn, I made myself a slideshow of inspirational quotes about the future, from Bartlett's on line quotations. That was at the office, and I would share some quotes, but I'm home and can't remember any of them. There was a funny one by Dan Quale, though. :rofl:

I change my desktop wallpaper about once a day. Sometimes I let it go a few days but not usually. My shots are usually artistic garden scenes.
My screensaver is a big deal to me, too. I am always collecting pics for various screensavers. Right now I have a "winter scenes" screensaver going but I'll soon change that over to Valentine's Day. I had a Christmas one and also a New Year's.
There's not much good I can say about Vista but the screensaver and desktop is easier and better than with other OS versions. That's what I use now although I have purchased programs in the past, like Windowblinds.
Here are some of my tips for wallpaper and screensavers:
--Webshots. You don't have to get locked into their program because you can use a .wbz converter. There's a very good one out called the Ultimate Webshots Converter. It's freeware but they ask you to send in a few bucks, which I did. I choose from both the professional photographers (wbz. files) or the member files. On the member files you don't even have to use the converter because they are already in .jpeg.
With Webshots you can get five free pics a day of the prof'l and as many as you want with the members' pics. www.webshots.com
--New Yorker magazine covers. Man, I love these.
Example:


They are so funny and they make me laugh when I choose them and have them up on my screen. I tile them after I size them for 400 px wide, but you wouldn't have to do that. I just do it because I love playing with images in Photoshop.
You can get all you want (3500 covers) at the New Yorker Web site in the New Yorker store. Be sure to click "zoom in." Go to "Prints."
http://www.thenewyorkerstore.com/
--Google "copyright free art" and you will find tons of places where you can get interesting art prints and photos.
--If you don't mind the watermark, you can go to stock art photo places and get good backgrounds, too. A lot of them give out free digital images with their newsletter (istockfotos does). My fave is www.corbis.com. You can find a pic there on ANY topic!
--And, as others mentioned, you can use your own digital photography. I sometimes make my own art with drawing or scanning in images.



Cher

Do you know my mom saved those and used them for actual wallpaper on our wall in the home where I grew up? She saved the extras and now I have some New Yorker covers from the 40s and 50s on my wall in the hall. I just slapped them up there with wallpaper glue. Thanks for that website. I can make different folders for screensavers and I just might make one using New Yorker covers!!

And in some cases, they already have the covers in themes (folders) for you. :)



Cher

When I googled "copyright free art" I found this Wikepedia listing of Public Domain Art which looks helpful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources

And speaking of google, I often use 'google images' and search by subject.

Would love to see some of your garden shots sometime included in your posts if you'd like to share.


On edit: It looks like the colon and "P" in that Wikepedia URL will need to be fixed (to replace the 'smilie').

They aren't quite kept as up to date as web searching, as I get a few more links that have been discontinued. I bet I use Google Images as much as I use Google Web.

I really didn't know how things worked since I'd never used one before, so every time that I saved a picture, it went to the machine's desktop as an icon. It's now littered with 100+ icons. :o Now that I think about it, it's probably really bad feng shui; I think that I need to take the time to fix it so that my desktop has better "energy".

At work, I have a really sweet picture of an outdoor scene that always makes me happy when I see it. I've changed it several times, but I always go back to it.

Even better than Webshots, IMHO, is Flickr. What an amazing assortment of photos posted there, always changing, easily available for download. You can search on keywords and watch slideshows, pick your favorites, store them, create your own slideshows. I use photos from there as my backgrounds and screensavers. They are just amazingly beautiful photos. I love to search for abstracts and gothic-type university buildings: Princeton (where I live), Yale, Cornell, even Stanford (though not gothic, some beautiful architecture anyway. Search on keywords like "abstract" or "barn" or "fishing village" or "fireworks" and see what you get.

Gorgeous photos I spend hours looking through.

Here is a current abstract favorite:


and another: (I could go on and on but had better stop here)

Punts at Oxford

Thanks for the recommendation. Those are beautiful pictures. I love the color--the idea to have all the chakra colors in the wallpaper suddenly appeals to me.

:hi: PBC

edited to add the :hi:

:hi: I love Flickr too.

:hi:

Note: I mean no disrespect to Hopper, whose work I love. It's just that I HAD to add something one day...

Another one I like:

Did you paint that in? Nice. I like Hopper too, but think he probably needed to get into a good tickle fight. Very somber, serious and lonely.

And the second image is intensely beautiful. Where is that?

images of flip-flops and beach bags), and even though they were photos, when placed on the painting, they somehow looked painted in. I did it with Paint, nothing fancy.

The second pic is just something that came up when I googled an image for "forest path." (I do a lot of googling for images--my computer is image heavy!) The pic of the forest path looks like areas outside of NYC, which we lived near when I was a teen.

It's now on my hard drive. Have you ever thought about the symbolism of roads in art?
We are always going somewhere, and we know this instinctively.

From my kids, vacation shots, my dog, to Hubble pictures of deep universe, I keep them changing.

Right now my husband placed this yearbook picture of me from my youth in Texas on our desktop - a life so totally different from mine now as a middle aged woman in Europe, it reminds me of how far we "travel" in one lifetime sometimes!
Man, have I learned and experienced a lot since those days....LOL.

I am smack dab in the middle top row.

1966-67......and sweet sixteen.....



:D

DemEx

Long dark hair? Great pic!

Since I grew up in that era, in Texas, let's just say I relate. :o

This reminds me of that junior college near Tyler, Texas that had that group that was like the Rockettes.

If you weren't on some sort of pep squad at my school, or at least in the band, you were some sort of outcast. I spent a lot of time flipping cards at football games and doing flag routines at halftime. Thank goodness for warm weather.

Yeah I had long dark hair in those days.

This was a highschool in the suburbs (at that time) of Houston - Spring Branch.

Even though there was a lot to dislike about that culture, the comradery, fun, and great exercise was very healthy and positive.

:-)

DemEx

Edward Burne-Jones' The Beguiling of Merlin displayed against a green celtic knot background up on my screen.