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.

Photo Friday: Dusk

This is my Photo Friday entry for this week, December 5, 2008. The theme is dusk and I thought I would recycle this picture of the glow over the mountains in Phoenix, Arizona after sunset. The exposure was 8 seconds and focal length 135mm.

Photo Friday: 'Black'

When this week's Photo Friday theme ('black') was announced, I thought of lava. The molten lava will turn black, the ocean entry is surrounded by black lava, and it was dark when the picture was taken. I took it with an old Canon PowerShot G1 in Hawaii at the Kilauea ocean entry in late July 2001 (8 sec shutter speed). When I tried playing around with the brightness, the glow from the lava just looked grainy so I left the image unaltered.

In the larger view you can see the flashlight glow of a crazy person that got closer than I was... Seeing this force of nature ranks as one of my most intense experiences!

Photo Friday Entry

Photo Friday entry for the week of November 21, 2008. The theme is "Food" and I thought my picture of a spider's mummified leftovers fit the bill!

Desert Ducks

I went to the Riparian Preserve in Gilbert, Arizona this afternoon to check out the waterfowl and perhaps take some pictures. The preserve has 8 ponds total and a plethora of ducks (at least today). I started out on the western side and there were quite a few people and what looked like domestic ducks in the first lake. I scooted over to the eastern side and found ducks and some wading birds. The photo on the right is a group of Black-necked stilts.

Took over 100 shots, but most of them were blurry. I've only taken pictures of birds that aren't afraid of people so this was a new experience for me. 

The picture on the left is a Great Blue Heron. I took a little artistic licence with this photo. It needed cropping and some exposure compensation. The original contains a lot more water and is a stop darker. 

There were a few species of ducks opposite the pond where the stilts, heron and a great egret were hanging out. These included Northern Pintails, Mallards, I think Northern Shovelers, Green Winged Teals, and some others. Northern Pintails are probably my favorite duck, and I got a recognizable shot of one. 

Flagstaff Fall

I've decided to start entering Photo Friday's weekly photo challenges. For this week the theme was Autumn. I took this shot years ago in the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff, Arizona. The trees are quaking aspens, named so because it does not take much of a breeze to get their leaves moving. This made the photography a little difficult. Wish I had done an artistic blurry image!

Valley of the Sun and Moon

Went out to Lost Dutchman State Park, at the foot of the Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix this afternoon. There were high clouds and I was hoping for some decent color from the sunset on the mountains. 

I hiked in a little bit and found this neat little Teddy Bear Cholla. This is a late afternoon shot of the mountain front. Lost Dutchman is just one of the jump off points to explore the Superstitions. It's a huge wilderness area with lots of Canyons and rock formations. 

I waited a while, taking some macro shots of cactus spines, while the sun went down. While the color didn't really hit the rock formations very effectively it certainly hit the clouds around moon.

At this point it was getting dark and the sunset looked spectacular. I was a bit worried that without a flashlight it would get too dark to find the car, so I hiked back to the trailhead and set up the tripod near there. During this time, the sky went from pinkish to red. 

I'm not particularly happy with the foreground scenery, but when the light is like this you gotta go with it. It is nice to get so many good pictures from one afternoon. Next project: find the foreground! I wish I had bought this camera sooner. To get photos like this on my 2nd trip out is encouraging.

Spider Food and Turtles

It's amazing what having to come up with a website for a Web design class can do to you. For me, it rejuvenated my interested in photography, which has been stagnate since about 2000. I ended up scanning in 1300 slides that I had taken and publishing them on my website.

This led me to buy a digital camera. I went with a Canon Rebel Xsi, because I already had some Canon lenses and it was priced right. The photo on the left is the mummified remains of the spider that lives in my back yard's dinner. I am pretty impressed with the camera considering how tiny this clump was. I did have to crop the image down substantially to get this view, though.

After I was done photographing the stuff in the back yard, I figured I would go to the zoo to learn how to use the camera. Early morning on a Tuesday shouldn't be too crowded right? Well, I was wrong. There were mobs of elementary school kids there. Took some pictures of the turtles and zebras and figured I'd come back another day!