The textures of the various plants, moss, and rock caught my eye. The hardness of the rock, the softness of the moss, the glossy smoothness of the the blade-type plant coupled with the variegated shades of the three-leafed plant attracted me. I converted to B&W to focus on the various tonalities and textures. Just experimenting …
Sagebrush Swirl
As I look at things, an urge to play sometimes comes over me. I couldn’t resist, the devil made me do it. I simply did a slow shutter speed circular swirl to capture this interesting abstract. I tend to see these abstracts when I notice an object with at clear center point and things radiation out from the center. This sagebrush provided an interesting opportunity. The following is the sagebrush from a normal perspective.
Sagebrush – Normal Perspective
I enjoy play!
Wildflowers – Snow Mountain Ranch
As I walked along the trail at Snow Mountain Ranch, I stopped frequently and just looked around enjoying the countryside. Almost every time, something caught my eye. This simple image of rocks and flowers was one of those moments.
Photography has taught me to see the beauty and interesting things around me. Today, everywhere I look, I see something interesting that makes me step back and enjoy the moment. When I become engrossed on a photographic subject, I feel like I become part of it. I am no longer just an observer.
Remnant – Snow Mountain Ranch
Back to Snow Mountain Ranch. Before it was a conservancy preserve, this beautiful countryside was a working ranch. Throughout the preserve, remnants of the past history are scattered about: watering tubs, barbed wire fences, barbed wire rolls, sheds, small corrals. These remnants of the past add interest to the preserve as well as provide photo opportunities.
Stairs to a Hidden Garden – Golden Gardens, Seattle
My friend and I went out for a little photoshoot on a bright Spring day. This was the first thing I saw. The stairs, surrounding rocks, and the plants were all different shades of brilliant green. I thought the different tonalities would make a good black and white image.
Sagebrush – Straight Out of Camera
This is an experiment to try to create an image that was in my mind when I shot this photo. The above image is the base image I captured. The sagebrush seems to blend into the background. I lost the 3D feeling that I had when I saw this bush. I first tried to add structure to the bush and delete structure from the background. That did not achieve what I wanted. I then tried black and white. That merged the brush with the background even more. I then tried to blur the background. That looked to “fakey” to me. I then blended the blurred B&W to the color image to come with the image below.
Sagebrush – Processed
This came the closest to what I saw in my mind.
Snow Mountain Ranch – Wildflowers
This little clump of white and pink wild flowers had a very interesting shape. It kind of looked like a huge clover bloom. The surrounding little yellow wildflowers highlighted the larger white/pink flowers.
Walking through the field of flowers, there were little vignettes everywhere. I would walk a little way, stop, and look around. Almost every time, something caught my eye. No one was around, it was quiet and peaceful. It was a great way to spend my time!
Daisies with Antlers
This clump of daisies (?) jumped out and grabbed me as I was walking by. It looked like the clump had a pair of antlers coming out of it. Old dead sagebrush take on very unusual shapes.
Snow Mountain Ranch – Field of Wildflowers
Like I mentioned in my last post, my objective of this photo excursion was to first enjoy the beautiful day and wildflowers. Then my photographic objective was to collect a series of images that captured the “Grand Landscape” of wildflowers and the area as well as smaller “Intimate Landscape” of flowers, rocks, sage brush, and other interesting objects. This image is somewhere in between. I picked this image because it gave me a feeling of being amongst the wildflowers instead of being apart from them and viewing them against a distant background. I actually was down on my elbows and knees when I took this image with a wide angle lens.
Colorado Blue Spruce Abstract 1
Sometimes it is just fun to play around with images. I knew that I would use various ways of post processing when I first took the image. Here is one version. Playing around a little more, I came up with the following abstract :
Colorado Blue Spruce Abstract 2