New Work From Your Old Archives!

"Zion Tree"

This morning I read a blog post from an acquaintance on G+, Alan Majchrowicz. It was about "Bringing Life to  Old Photos". I definitely could relate to his words since I also have a habit of reviewing images that were shot years  earlier. The image above is a product of that habit. Whenever I return from a trip I will review all of the images. I will process all the favorites and then it may be months or years later before I go back and take another look through all the "losers". Oh heck, I shouldn't call them that. The favorites were probably the tens out of the group.There may possibly be many eights and nines in the remaining images and maybe a ten that I overlooked first time around. This can happen because my expectations are different immediately after a trip. I usually have a few shots that I am really excited about but sometimes I don't think the final image conveys how excited I was when I initially created the image. Several years later my mind has cleared of all those expectations. Software, my processing skills, and my vision have also changed and I hope for the better.
"Zion Tree" was taken three years ago in Utah's Zion National Park. I may have liked it better as a color image if it had a rich blue sky and better light to contrast with the snow and red rock. The light was flat and the sky was gray. When I looked back at it a few months ago, I thought "it may make a nice black and white". After making all the adjustments in Photoshop I was pleased  but I did feel it needed one last tweak. Most of the Topaz filters seem to be used a little heavy handed  by most photographers but a little bump from "Topaz Detail" worked perfectly to add a little texture back into the snow. I created a separate layer for that adjustment and then masked the layer so it only had an affect on the snow.

Snowmageddon! New record snowfall for Dallas!

On Wednesday I saw a tweet from Pete Delkus one of the weather guys at channel 8. "snowmageddon is on the way!!!!!!!!!!!!" A few tweets later he said we should get 1"-3". HA! If he had said we would get 10"-12" we would have all thought he was nuts but 36 hours later he would have looked like the weather genius if he had. I woke up Thursday to see that an inch had already fallen. The forecast still called for snow all day. Well, I don't think it stopped until around 2am Friday morning. We ended up with 11.2 inches for the day which broke the old record of 7.8 inches. We must have had another 1.3 inches after midnight which made the total for the storm 12.5 inches. That was also a new record.

Bird Houses on our Fence

The temperature was at or just above freezing the whole time it snowed. There was little wind and this wet snow stuck to the trees and bushes like crazy. It seemed every little twig had at least 2 inches clinging to it. Bigger limbs had a lot more.The more it snowed the more incredible all the trees looked. Around 11:30pm we noticed that it seemed really bright outside. Much brighter than earlier in the evening and much brighter than when I got up the next morning. The clouds must have been just right so that the lights of the city were reflected right back at us. The front of my house was photographed at 1:45 am. I actually had to darken the exposure some to make it look more like night. The light had such a great quality to it I almost got in the car and drove around to find something else to shoot.

 

My Back yard

  

 My Front yard

I headed out early Friday morning. Fortunately the temperature was still  at 32 degrees and not the 29 degrees they predicted. The roads were slushy but not frozen solid. Driving was not a problem. Everything looked awesome. I first stopped where the road crossed White Rock Creek. I got a few photos of this area where a trail follows the creek. I then got back in the car and headed to Lakeside Park located along Turtle Creek. Many limbs had broken off the trees in this part of town but I was still able to get some good shots of the trees reflecting in the creek. While I was out shooting I heard several loud cracks as another limb broke and fell to the ground. When I got back to my vehicle a limb was now laying in the street about 10 feet behind my truck. The snow was now starting to fall off the trees pretty quickly. I knew it wouldn't last forever. I did get one last shot of a dock at White Rock Lake.

The Trail near White Rock Creek

  

 Another View of the Trail near White Rock Creek

  

 Turtle Creek

 

Dock at White Rock Lake

20/20 gallery and several new images!

 If you go to the Galleries page on my website you will find a gallery of the best 20 images from my "Twenty Nights in Twenty Days" project. I am pleased with the results. While doing the project I noticed several other blogs which encouraged people to do a 365 project. I love to shoot but I can't imagine trying to come up with a good interesting image for everyday of the year. On my project I had a couple of days where I wasn't too thrilled about the results. It is just going to happen occasionally. Once I hit the road when my art show schedule starts back up there will be days when it will be quite difficult to find the time to shoot something interesting, process the images, and post it to my blog. Some days there just is a lot of other things that need to get done. I did look at a link from a "365 project"  image that was posted on a blog. The first 20 out of 23 images were snapshots of the guys 3 year old doing things. Several were cute but most were boooooooring! Some were poorly exposed and poorly processed. I would never make my fans suffer through something like that.

Sunrise at Bryce Canyon

Soooooo..what do these three images have to do with my Twenty Twenty project? Absolutely nothing.  Sometimes I review and process images immediately after a trip or shoot. I'm always real excited about some of them but it's still a good idea to review them at a later date. Your emotions, expectations, and memories have faded by then and you can look at what you shot with a new and fresh outlook. Many times instead of shooting new work you can create some nice images by reviewing and processing some of what you already have. Bryce was taken back in November. The rainbow was taken back in late August while in Colorado. It started sleeting on us right after taking it. A small image on the internet probably doesn't do it justice. Zion was shot several years ago.

Rainbow from Mount Evans

Winter in Zion

White Christmas in Garland, Texas!

I've lived in the Dallas area for 57 years and it finally happened...snow on the ground on December 25th. It wasn't very much snow. We never get very much around here. It started Christmas Eve right after lunchtime. For several hours it came down quite hard but the temperature was above freezing and it was melting as soon as it hit the ground. Around 4:30 the temperature had dropped and the snow finally started sticking. It continued for another three hours but was light. We only ended up with a little over an inch at my house, but enough to call it a White Christmas. First one here since 1926, and I missed that one.

I just had to go out Christmas morning and take some pictures in my back yard because I knew the snow would start melting as soon as the sun got up good. We also had to be at my mother in laws around noon. Several critters had left tracks in the fresh snow. Something had crossed the fence and gone over to the edge of the pond and then left the way it came. Probably a cat. The picture above is an interesting set of tracks which came from the back fence and then vanished under the deck through a small opening. If you look close you can see a line down the middle of the tracks. I'm guessing this was a rat or a very large mouse. Looks like I will be going to the hardware store tomorrow and getting a present for this rodent.