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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.