I got up very early on Saturday for Burrowing Owls and again on Sunday for a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park. (Owls were great. RMNP, not so much: animal total was 1 moose, a half-dozen mangy deer, and not a single elk. Too windy to look for Pika and Marmots on top). I’m way too tired for serious photo editing, so instead of working through my backlog of photos, I’ve been puttering around in my catalog of older images.
In the course of said puttering, I ran across this fairly-old image of Leafy Aster. I’ve always liked the texture of the center of the flower, but the flower petals are tad too worn to make for a really great image. On a lark, I converted the image to monochrome. Add a little dodging and burning, lots of contrast, a slight color tone, and voila. The worn flower works much better in monochrome.
This is a flowering prickly pear cactus that I photographed in Arches National Park earlier this summer. I shot this image at a number of different apertures to get just the right depth of field. I wanted the flower to be sharp, but for the thorns and the leaf to be slightly soft, but recognizable. This is my favorite of the bunch.
This is a stylized version of the first shot. I’m not sure whether I like the straight image better or the version. If you have a preference, please leave a comment below.
Things have been a little slow photographically lately. Not really winter (it was 72(!) in Denver today), but not quite spring yet — things have yet to green up, there are no baby animals to photograph, and the migrant birds are still a couple of months away. But there are some hopeful signs — this is a semi-abstract image of the first flower to bloom in my garden this year.
