sk8r’s as Art

admin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 13:54:19 +0000

Yesterday I posted a wildlife shot which was rare for me. Today my post is even more rare, pictures that I didn’t take! My friend and colleague Brenda Berry is crazy for skateboarding pics. To be fair her son Mason, “The Weasel”, loves to hit the park and Brenda needed something to do while watching out for him. Now she is hooked! Brenda took these pics and you can see the originals on her site. On a recent trip Brenda took me along to the park. The picture with the photographer in the foreground is Brenda and not me. I’m not quite ready to rock the tie dye T!

I was inspired by the Dave Hill look and so the grungy look of his work is what these pics are all about. That and Mason dropping in and stuff. Who knew sk8rs had their own fakey lingo?

[View with PicLens]

Bobcat As Art

admin — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:03:42 +0000

I don’t do very many wildlife shots, they just don’t work very often. I really liked this shot; the bobcat sitting up and posing so perfectly and the colorful mountain background, well it seemed that I had to add it to my portfolio of digital paintings.

I will be leading a photography workshop to this location at the end of October, check it out on the PAW website.

Skimmer Chick as Art

admin — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:13:35 +0000

This is a bit different than the normal “art” that I post. I was fortunate to be around when a colony of Black Skimmers were hatching. There were chicks of every age from freshly hatched to fledged. This little puffball was stretching his wings and I thought it was very cute. I decided to create this panoramic montage of the action. I call March of the Skimmers. I hope you like it.

Geese as Art

admin — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 18:46:07 +0000

I don’t often pixel paint two images at the same time, but I though that these would look together if you hung them together as a pair. I photographed these Snow Geese at the famed Bosque del Apache in New Mexico. Bosque is an all time favorite palce to photograph and it was the place that I went on my very first workshop. Coincidentally I am leading a workshop there myself this year. Maybe I’ll find some more painitngs. You should come and check it out, its is a terrific workshop, if I do say so myself! Here is the link for more information about the workshop.

More Cactus as Art

admin — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:24:36 +0000

I have been re-organizing all of my images on to a single DROBO hard drive. Very nice piece of equipment. While I was going through the images, I found this cactus that was in bloom and thought it would make a nice bit of artwork. What do you think?

Cactus as Art

admin — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:37:22 +0000

I don’t do too many landscape paintings mostly because I don’t shoot very many landscapes… When I was in Texas we were photographing birds from blinds and this is one of the features that they planted and hoped for birds to use it as a perch. When the light was getting soft in the late afternoon, I took this image of the prickly pear cactus and lantana. I thought it would look pretty good as a painting and this is what I created.

Painted Bunting as Art

admin — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:55:35 +0000

I know I have not posted in a while, but I have been off finding some great new images and working on PAW. PAW is the workshop company that I work with and if you are looking for a photography workshop, then that is the place! Check out their website, The Photographers Alliance Workshops.

I was in Texas for a terrific 10 days and made a lot of great images. You can read about my exploits, here. One of my favorites from the trip was this Painted Bunting. Not that a bird like this needs to be turned into art, but I could not resist. They call the Painted Bunting, “the bird only a 5 year old could color!”

Everglades Sunset as Art

admin — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:49:27 +0000

I recently took a client to the Everglades for a private workshop and we were working on a trick using white balance settings to enhance the colors of a sunset. I made this sunset stitching together two horizontal images and then cropping it to a panorma. The last step was to “paint” the image. I’ve included the before and after images.

Flying Tern as Art

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:10:01 +0000

One of the nice things about my Nikon D300 is shooting really fast, as in 8 frames per second fast! I often end up with a burst of pictures and they in turn lend themselves to a montage like this one. This is 4 exposures of the same Royal Tern layered together to make one image of the Royal Tern landing on the shore.

Willet as Art

admin — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 21:05:21 +0000

I was camping the Everglades National Park a few weeks ago and one morning I noticed hundreds of shorebirds along the coastline near Flamingo. When I went to investigate I found nearly a thousand Willets had most likely just landed in the US on the northern migration. Quite the spectacle to say the least.

I noticed the one birds attention and so I decided to conver this image to black and white and leave the one bird in color to sort of attact your eye towards him.

I used Adobe Photoshop CS4 to make a selection around the bird and then NIK sofywares Silver efx for the conversion to balck and white.