1 Adventure

Funky Tree Lichen of Fall 2004

Ok these are not favorite, nor best stuff, but they did come out interesting, and I like the impressionist type quality they have. These are macro shots of some very interesting tree lichen I found while in Lost Maples. I had to hold extremely still as they were perched on a branch on this little bluff, and the wind keep blowing knotching the branch around. Had fun with it.

Colors of Fall in Texas, Well In One Part of Texas

Took this unusual image while at Lost Maples State Natural Area. A favorite place of mine to go backpacking during the fall, weather is half the time raining, half the time brilliant sunny days. Especially beautiful in the fall when the maple leaves start changing throughout the park. They require shorter day periods and a bit of cold weather to change the phenolics in the leaves, resulting in a degredation of the leaf chemistry (a pH change) which changes them from green, yellow, orange, red, and even dark red wine colored one. Probably the closest thing to fall (colorwise) for us Texans. Never miss it. In any case, while backpacking you usually end up with lots of extra time when not hiking so, my friend Bryan posed for a few ideas I had. This was one of the photos, brightened it up a little, and this is the result. :)

Any American City - Selective Color Experiment - New York City Photography

Really liked how this photo came out. There might be a few things I would change, but working with a 2mb pixel camera on my PDA and enhancements in photoshop make it kinda hard to do. This photo was a recent entry in a Photo Content in Selective Color on http://www.photographycorner.com. A great forum with an amazing bunch of talented people. Unfortunately I didn't win, but I think the best part was working with this photo in the first place. This actually happens to be one of the my first selective color experiments I did in photoshop. I used to do a bunch of selective color on B/W prints I would print out in the darkroom, and color with magic color pencils. Good fun.

Overall doing selective color in Photoshop is not too difficult. Here's how: Open the image that you want to do selective color on, and in the "Image" menu, select "Desaturate". Which will turn the image to black and white, then using the same "Image" menu select "Adjust" and finally "Brightness/Contrast". This will enable you to add more contrast to the image so the color stands out better in the when you color it. Next to start to select areas you would like to color. In the left hand tool bar, select the "history" tool, and adjust accordingly and start to "color in" any area on the image you want to convert back to color. For example, the flags in the above photo were done this way, but very carefully as the detail was important, and many of the flags were often behind trees or particular structures.

Here was the original.