Blue Trees

I was housebound for almost three weeks with a tenacious virus, and am glad to say that I seem to have recovered finally. I haven’t been out with my camera since our Holbrook trip, and as a result, have been pulling photos from the archives to edit and post here, the exception being the sunflowers and chair photos from last week. Next week, we will be in Alaska- and finally I will have some opportunities for photography!

When I’m sick, I tend only seem to have enough energy for Words With Friends and photo editing apps on my iPhone. Below is one of my favorite recent iPhone creations. I took the photo out the car window as we were approaching Prescott on the trip back from Southern California in March and then edited it last week on my phone. I cropped it heavily and layered it with several textures, playing with blend modes until it looked the way I wanted. I added one more texture to the trees in Photoshop- and voila!

 

Traditions

Over the weekend, we spent some time at ‘Tis, the gallery where my show took place. Yes, the Fourth Friday reception was wonderful, but the seemingly endless self-promotion part is finally done- so enough said about that! The main gallery had the annual Native American show- arguably the best show of the year- and it was phenomenal. On Sunday there was an exhibition of dances by an Apache family featuring their children, who are learning the hundreds of years old traditions of their people.

This image is a closeup of the dad playing one of several flutes he demonstrated .

iPhone image, edited in Photoshop and Topaz Impression

Retro Blur

I found myself playing with my Lensbaby Mobile recently. Although it really is a cool little lens for the iPhone, I hadn’t been using it much after I got my Composer Pro and optics for my Nikon. As I’ve mentioned before, Nik Snapseed is my usual first stop when editing my iPhone photos, and this time, it was my ONLY stop.  It has a cool little set of filters within the app called retrolux, which give a desaturated, vintage look (actually 12 looks) with lots of options for adding or removing scatches, light leaks, vignettes etc.

The photo on the left has been edited with Snapseed only, and the one on the right has several Kim Klassen textures added in Photoshop on top of what was done with the retrolux filter. It’s hard to spot the differences- just a little more texture, a little less haze and a slightly darker flower.

retrodip