Archive for the ‘Sunset Crater’ Category

For this picture, it originally was an interesting stump, surrounded by pine needles. What I didn’t see initially was the lone piece of bark. The initial picture was pretty blah as it was.

Then I cropped just the small piece of bark to start.

For the next, I decided not to try so many gradients and filters. I cut the bark and copied and moved it around the whole piece, trying to avoid any specific look of a repeat. Then I looked at embossing with contour and texture marked – except for the upper right, which seemed fine and added a little depth. So along with looking like bark, it also looks like a photo from a plane of the topography of the earth.

This is so much fun! This was the second picture of a nice bush among the lava. I cropped it down to one small section so we could focus on one small area of the bush.

Then I adjusted for levels.

This one I looked at brightening, as the day really was quite bright at the Crater.

I looked at emphasizing shadows with this, using the black eye dropper to empasize the little hidden spots.

Now that I have some understanding of gradients, I really like fooling with them- and then adjusting each layer for additional effects.

The ocean filter does some interesting thngs…

THis is a gradient (I think red, blue, yellow) with the “difference” used on the layer.

These are two different looks from the curves adjustment.


Craquelure filter…

Copper gradent with some additional work on the layer…

Emphasizing the color green…

I downloaded the photos we took at Sunset Crater and Wupatki, just to see how I had done. Great shots! I have to do some light corrections on a few, but overall I am very pleased. The bark closeups look great! Here is the first original of an aspen growing amidst layers of lava.

Then it just became fun to play with the photo, using all I had learned in my Photoshop classes. This next is with levels and color corrections.

Now for some filters! In order: black and white, glass, palette knife, and gradient.

A few weeks ago a letter arrived from one of my lists about the art of “miksang” – looking at the small stuff for the beauty within. The photos were interesting, and I started giving this some thought. This past week for our anniversary we went to Sedona, and thence on a picnic to Sunset Crater with our friends. We were on a sketching/photographic journey.

Every time I’ve been to Sunset Crater I’ve wanted to sketch the trees. I absolutely love this place – there is such beauty in destruction – another Japanese concept called wabi-sabi. So this time I took my pad and pencils and just sat and started to sketch. Since we were limited in time, I knew I wanted to go fast, which meant the pencil was moving – no time to critique or rework anything.

I loved it. And at one point an Asian gentleman came to look over my shoulder, and I heard him say, “Ah, wabi-sabi.” I was thrilled – I was actually capturing the beauty of this particular trunk. I got a few sketches done – next time I need a camp chair with a mug holder for my pencils!

One thing, overall, that I noticed, was that, because of my vision, I tend to always look large – trying to take in the big picture. This worked really well at one of the turn-offs, where you had a canyon formed by lava. Great vistas. But then I started to really look small – several colors of lichens growing on the lava, shades of blacks and browns in the lava itself, and lots of bark. I have been absolutely fascinated with tree bark for years – who knows why? But I got some sketching and pictures done – lots to play with over the next few weeks.