Photo Friday: In Shadow

Ruins at Mesa Verde in the late afternoon.

Photo Friday: My Favorite Spot

One of my favorite spots, Fish Creek, Superstition Wilderness, Arizona.

Photo Friday: Big and Small

Three toed sloth with baby in the Amazon Rainforest of Peru.

Photo Friday: Wildlife

Haven't had any good images for the Photo Friday challenges in the past few months and been busy so couldn't go out and get new photos. This is a picture of Pronghorn Antelope that I took years ago. I think it was taken in the desert between Flagstaff and Meteor Crater, AZ. I did crop it and sharpen it (perhaps overly so?). I like the color in this photo, so I picked it over a close up that I have.

Photo Friday: White

This fungus growing on the side of a pine tree in South Carolina really caught my attention. Parts of it looked like toasted coconut! Went back a couple of days later to get a better shot and it had aged. I did not lug my tripod on the plane, so it was shot with a Canon XSi, at 55mm on full auto, 1/125 sec, f8.0, ISO 200.

Photo Friday: Weathered

The Theme for this week's Photo Friday is weathered. I have a lot of better photos for this theme, but this one isn't of an often photographed western landmark. I took this picture in the canyon of Fish Creek years ago in the Superstition Wilderness, AZ. It was an El Nino year, so there were quite a few rainstorms, which left standing water in normally dry canyons. It was a special trip for me, and this picture almosts captures the moment! Taken with a Canon Eos Elan on Fuji Velvia.

Orton and Me

I've always been a purist when it comes to photography, but in the switch to digital I've learned that post processing is almost a necessity. I still generally try to keep it to a minimum, but in my web searches for tips on post processing I came upon the Orton Effect. Originally this was done on film when the photographer took a two different exposures of the same subject with one out of focus and put them together into one image. It creates a quite interesting artistic, painterly effect. The original photo of the stilts above is in my Desert Ducks post from last month. I played around with quite a few images and found that it has the potential to make mediocre images fairly interesting, but only a select few pictures seem to benefit from it. The technique I used can be found here. It is quite easy to do in Photoshop.

The original photo of this Egret is on the left. I was not excited about it because it is flying away from me and the wings are a bit blurry. The "ortonized" version on the right looks a bit more interesting and the blur in the wings is not as important.

The purple flower on the left is a pretty good picture. When I used the Orton Effect on it, however, the colors in the photo got much richer and an interesting three dimensional effect was added.


The leaves of this Aspen were blurry because it was a slightly breezy day when I took the picture. Ortonizing the photo enhanced this blurriness and enriched the colors.