Today's Best? Holy cow!

It started with a shot of an abandoned and dilapitated coming into town. And frankly, I'm not even sure why I snapped a shot of it other than the fact that it was there and I had my camera ready to go. When I saw the shot, I thought, Hmm. Maybe I can do something with that...

And so I started to work with it. I cut the house out of the original shot and added it to a shot of fields near my parents' house. Then the careful editing and texturing began. I got more and more excited as I put it together. Not half bad, I thought to myself:

When it was finished, I did my usual routine: posted it on Flickr. Yeah, that was it...at first. I printed out a copy for myself to see how it looked, and I was kind of pleased. I used a matte paper that I'd never tried before, and the results were better than I had expected.

Seeing that, I posted the image as a canvas print to my Zazzle store. I didn't think anything of it beyond that. That is until I checked my secondary email account and got this message:

Hi NicholeRenee,

Congratulations! Your product, Left Behind in the Haze of Summer, has been selected as one of Today's Best on Zazzle! This means it will appear on the Zazzle homepage for the rest of today and it will also be added to the Today's Best Awards Showcase. Keep up the great work!

Holy cow! I checked out Zazzle's website and there it was! Oh my gosh!

Cool! Now I just have to get someone to buy a copy! Ha ha!!

Seriously, though. I'm a pretty humble gal, so any acknowledgement of my work gets me excited. Something like this? I'm like a kid again, telling my mom and making my husband stare at the computer screen with me. Validation? Makes me pretty happy...