Warp Painting, and Photoshop blended images

I spent some time this afternoon painting the warp for my woven ruana project. I used Dharma Fiber Reactive dyes, and the instructions on this page: http://www.dharmatrading.com/html/eng/208788-AA.shtml?lnav=techniques.html . I chose black, turquoise, blue, and wine red for my colorway. The yarn is sitting all rolled up in saran wrap for the evening, so the dye can set. I'll wash the extra dye out of it tomorrow, and see what I get then.

In the meanwhile, I've been playing with Photoshop at school in my photography class. Oh man, I so need to upgrade the version I have. Elements 7 just doesn't do some of the fun stuff that I was doing this evening.

The current assignment is to blend images together. We used two different methods. In the first, we put two (or more) images next to each other, overlapping slightly. Then we used the auto-blend feature to fuzz the edges and stitch the images together. Here's what I came up with:

My cat, looking at a pond full of ducks. Itty bitty ducks! (Well, ok. They weren't itty bitty when I took the shot of the pond at Bumblebee Ranch. But I love the illusion.)

A horned toad sitting on top of my garden sculpture.

Fireworks + a 'walk' sign at night. (The car was moving, so I got that neat 'whoosh!' to it.)

And my violin, a piano, and my son playing my doumbek.

The second method we used was to lay one image over the second, and then mess about with how opaque the images were. The under image shows through the over image, so both are visible. Like this:

This is one of the fireworks shots, and a photo from last week's SCA fighter practice. I am amused by how perfectly the fireworks ended up being placed. Targeting systems ON!

This is one of the photographs I took of the most recent annular eclipse, seen through the smoke from the Arizona wild fires. I overlaid it with an image of a camp fire.

This is the modeling stand at the local community college, where I spend my time as a life drawing model. The skeleton is my plastic modeling buddy Jerry. He's holding the timer that lets me know when a pose is finally done.

And this one amused me. It is a cotton field, and the sign from the side of a truck. The 'Snow for Arizona' folks were out last Christmas time, making a snow pit for the desert kids to play in. But normally here, if I see a winter field all covered in white fluffy stuff? It is cotton waiting for harvest.

I need to print two pictures from each method of blending images, to turn in on Wednesday. Help! I can't decide! Which ones do you like?