Starry Sky with Aspen Trees

 

I made this picture of bare Aspens last Fall against the background of a Cobalt Blue, classic Utah sky. I loved how the trees seemed to dance in the air – without moving, just because we would see their outstretched branches. But the picture seemed to lack something – that bare blue sky was almost too stark for the mood I wanted to express. So, playin’ around the other day, I layered over it a textured sky I had gotten from a friend. It made a huge difference in the effect this picture had on me. It feels wintry, now, and looks like snow is falling. Sometimes, you make a picture in response to something that you can’t quite express at the moment, and the picture won’t work until you take it a little further in processing. This might be too much processing for some of you reading this, but as an artist, I like to explore adding texture and mood to some of my photographs that will be used as wall decor.

 

 

Addendum to my post announcing Topaz Labs’ B&W Effects:

 

Fields of the Palouse, eastern Washington

This won’t be very large here, as it’s a 79-inch wide (that’s 6 feet folks!) panorama of this great field, but I wanted to test something out based on a blog comment about Topaz plug-in B&W Effects not functioning properly. This was a 245 MB file, in 16 bit, and the plug-in handled it just fine. I did a simple black and white conversion for test purposes, but it all worked great using this plug-in.