Happy New Year !

First, I want to wish everyone a Happy and Prosperous New Year !

We've been at home in Missouri after Christmas in Nebraska. We've had a great time with the kids and family. The weather across the midwest for the entire holiday season hasn't allowed for great photography. The natural colors on the plains at this season are buffs and grays, and with the cloudy skies it makes for a very monochrome color palate.

What do you do with a capture with little color? Work with the contrasts of the image and try to generate an interesting image in black and white. This image almost begins as sepia in it's original color. I've played with a number of settings to get to this "antique postcard" look.

The conversion is done in Photoshop CS4 using adjustment layers:
- B&W Conversion at default settings
- Exposure, with offset set at -0.065 (to generate mid-range contrast)
- Photo Filter, choosing Sepia filter, then increasing the density to 40%

The vignette is a large brush (1000 px) with a speckle pattern and 10% opacity. Used two overlapping passes to provide the graduated pattern. No sharpening to help with the antique look.

Vacation Photos - Day Six

Friday dawned with a thick fog. The evening cleared and I headed west to the upper end of Enders Reservoir for a vantage point. There are a series of bluffs along the south side of the lake valley. This photo is from that vantage looking across the sunset towards the hills southwest.

Vacation Photos - Day Three

I went south to high points on Frenchman Creek for the sunrise.

This is the Frenchman Valley looking southeast across the rising sun. This area is considered semi-arid. The rain fall averages 15 to 18 inches per year. They have seen record amounts of rain this spring. The hills are greener at this point in July than some residents can ever remember.

After leaving the hilltop I was driving one of the canyon roads scouting photo sites for later in the week. I encountered a flock of wild turkeys. This photo has an adult female at the center. If you look at the lower right you will see three of an uncountable number of poults that were moving with the group.

The evening was overcast directly overhead, but it was clear to both the north and the south. This image of a thunderhead is from an access road south of the lake looking north towards Enders. The storm clouds were over 60 miles away. To the south we could see the tops of thunderheads at a distance approaching 130 miles away. This is truly big sky country.