A Golden Moment in the Larch Bog

A Golden Moment in the Larch Bog

Chosen as a Featured Image at Fine Art America

Hand painted sky completes the image in this image that combines elements of photography and watercolor painting. An edition of 25 signed originals is created with a certificate of authenticity along with a digitally initialed open edition. To purchase the signed original with a certificate of authenticity, contact the artist directly, or click here: http://bit.ly/2ou9Pqr

The digitally initialed open edition provides you with the closest approximation of an original without the premium cost of the original. Open Edition prints of this image are available for as little as $12.26

A Golden Moment in the Larch Bog 

De-emphasizing a Busy Background

Sometimes an images background is just so distracting that it makes the image unusable. Of course there are the more extreme solutions to this such as cutting out the background altogether but in the case of this bittersweet pictured right, removing the background is for practical purposes impossible because the berries are so numerous that they can't be selected out.

Well here's one way to make the background less busy in order to emphasize the central focus of the image. Using almost any good image software you remove the color entirely and then using a history brush return only the central colors to the image - or create multiple layers of saturation that achieve similar results.

Since I often prefer a more "tonal" background, I will often take an extra step and add in a single tone to make a duotone background.

Below you will see two images representing the end result of this process. The first with no color added back into the background and the second with a very muted level of color added back in. I prefer the second, but you may find the first more appealing. In either case, you are likely to agree that it makes the image more enjoyable to view.

Bittersweet Vertical 1



Bittersweet Vertical 2


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Deep Woods Trove

On a recent visit to the Beech Hill Farm in Hopkinton, NH, I took the time to follow their nature walk. The walk itself, through the beautiful woods adjacent to the farm was quite peaceful, although those who might have been looking for self help signage would have been disappointed. I noticed a splash of color within the litter off the trail and left the trail to find this exquisite grouping of mushrooms.

The simple image itself was quite extraordinary but I am even more fond of it when certain aspects of the image are emphasized or de-emphasized. Interestingly, while this image has been manipulated to create a Mindscape. The color of the mushrooms themselves has not been altered in any way.

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Maple Ablaze Mindscape

This image is created from three different images taken in the same general area and lending themselves to an interesting blending.
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Children of the Pow Wow

Anyone who tells you that children these days have no sense of place in the world or their community has never seen the look in the eyes of the young men and women of Native American tribes at a Pow Wow.

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Amethyst Fire

Several images over the past few weeks have found their start at Gemstar Gemstones in Enfield NH. This is not only one of the best gem and bead stores I've ever seen, it is also an adventure from an aesthetics point of view - with all kinds of interesting elements from shelves filled with Amethyst geodes to wind chimes made of colored agate and the colorful birdhouses.

Amethyst Fire was born of a simple image of two large amethyst geodes amid a field of smaller colored agate bookends. The original image itself was colorful and fun but lacked that certain something that made it a conversation piece.

This piece was created using a smudging process in the areas surrounding the large geodes. In many ways this process is similar to the process once done using a polaroid image that was manually altered during the process of its 60 second development. In those days of course the outcome was a final print of standard polaroid size - which for most folks meant about 3" x 3".

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Birdhouse Beachfront

While visiting one of the best bead shops in America, Gemstar Gemstones in Enfield NH, I had the opportunity to photograph this group of birdhouses that resembled a bunch of colorful houses on a beachfront. Thus was born Birdhouse Beachfront!

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Combining Images to Tell a Story

They (whoever "they" are!) say a picture is worth a thousand words and this is true. But two images combined together may just create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts and form one image that is worth ten thousand words.

It may also simply tell the story you intend to tell more effectively or simply capture the imagination of the viewer in a more powerful way.

The picture at the right begins to tell a story, but the people standing in the background . . . well they don't really capture the human side of the story very well.

I was in the city of Calibar, Nigeria with Kip Bates and in our exploration we came upon a beautiful grove of rubber trees through which stretched a dirt path traveled by children fetching water for their families in the village nearby.

I was intrigued by the rubber tree taps and the colorful nature of the tree where it is slashed to allow the sap to drip into the bucket. I was equally intrigued by the sight of the children walking through the grove on their way home. I took quite a few images of both but found myself unsatisfied with all of them as "stand alone" images that told a story.

So I set about to create a Mindscape tellling a story using a combination of images. Mindscape is my term for a manipulated image that captures a story or takes a step beyond the simple image.

The first step was to isolate the tapped rubber tree and to emphasize the colors of the tree where it had been slashed. This was done by first using the Extract function of Photoshop to remove the unwanted people from the image. Having done that, I then used the saturation filter to bring out the color a bit more, without changing it. The resulting image you see below.

Then, I chose about 6 different images to experiment with as my base image. Dropping the tapped tree over them and making a judgement about whether they worked aesthetically first and secondarily if they told a story in a more powerful way. In other words: was the "whole" (the combined image) greater than the sum of the parts?

With three of the images, my answer was almost immediately "No". Not because the combined images didn't work at all, but because the final result did not hold the promise of the other three images.

Once I had picked the three to use, I then worked on each image to improve the blending of the two images. This involved using the cloning tool, the paint tool and in the case of the final image below, I went so far as to mute the background using both gaussian blur and desaturation followed by full restoration of the colors central to the image but only partial restoration of the background colors.

The results can be seen below:

Rubber Tree Mindscape

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Walking Through Rubber Trees

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Children of the Rubber Forest

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Clothes on Grate in Ghana

A stand alone image. Photographed in Accra, Ghana.

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An Adventure in the "Golden Season"

Everyone knows about the brilliant colors of Autumn in New England. For three or four weeks every year hotels and restaurants all over New England fill with visitors eager to experience the thrill of scenery that captures the imagination. 

Larches along the bog. One original photo captured in this location.  

If you have never experienced "peak" foliage it is an experience that should be on everyone's "bucket list". But this entry focuses on the period after peak that is a well kept secret of locals. Native peoples of the region variously referred to the time as the Golden season or the yellow season. The peak of foliage has passed - and so too have the crowds. The days are crisp but the bitter cold of winter has not yet set in, and the slow pokes of the autumn season - the tamaracks (larches) and occasionally the birches and beeches continue to show off in the sea of brown that are the remnants of peak foliage passed.

It was at just this time, that I choose to seek out an image or two that captured the beauty of this season. On a drive from Franconia to Woodsville, New Hampshire, I came upon a bog with brilliant larches amid the browns and greens of the hardwoods and (other) conifers. I stopped and spent a good deal of time exploring around the bog and capturing images that struck my fancy. As is often the case, one simple spot yielded a plethora of views - all worthy of an image. 

A chance "fly by" of migrating geese later in the drive found itself woven into one of the resulting "Mindscapes".

For some of the resulting images, describing them as Mindscapes might seem a stretch because a casual glance may lead you to conclude that the changes reflect only a modest amount of manipulation of contrast, brightness and perhaps saturation. Without a long explanation of why this is not the case, let me simply state that the changes reflect more than these simple changes. 

Using the original image above for the first image below, I emphasized the yellows of the Larches and some of the grasses in the water to arrive at the image I call Franconia Bog Larches Mindscape below.

Franconia Bog Larches Mindscape

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As stated earlier, a chance encounter with a flock of geese, provided fodder for the Mindscape below, entitled Larches & Geese Mindscape.

Larches & Geese Mindscape

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From a different vantage, I captured the image below. Note that the larches appear to be brighter than in the original of the first image. I can only explain this as an anomaly in the way the camera captured the light from one image to the other. 

By emphasizing certain elements of the image and de-emphasizing others, the image below, entitled Franconia Bog Fresco was created.

Franconia Bog Fresco

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Another Image, slightly closer to the focal point of the scene lent itself to the creation of several different Mindscapes. The original image Franconia Pond and Larches #9 has led to the creation of the five different images the first of which you will see below. 

Franconia Pond Larches Mindscape #9

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From this one original image I created 5  different Mindscapes, the first of which you see above. The other four can be seen by clicking here.

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Ibadan Dryer Mindscape

Clotheslines are one of my favorite subjects. While they are making a comeback in the US, they never went away in places like Ibadan, Nigeria where this image was captured.

I like the image to the right but also find that it is a bit too busy. with too many elements that distract from the focal points of the image. This was the main reason that I decided to convert it into a Mindscape. 

Looking at the original image, the two elements that I wanted to preserve were the clothesline and the yellow containers immediately below the clothesline. Having decided that it was then a (relatively) simple matter to  isolate the desired elements using a duo color filter to create the image to meld with the original. The most time consuming aspects of creating an image like this is the time needed to bring only the clothesline back using the history brush. A less careful approach will show the colors of the walls where they intersect the clothesline. This is achieved by viewing the image at actual pixel size while using the filter. The resulting image can be seen below.

Clothesline Photographed in Ibadan, Nigeria

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Purchase Flowerheads

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Franconia Pond Larches Mindscape #11

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Franconia Pond Larches Mindscape #10

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Franconia Pond Larches Mindscape #9

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Franconia Bog Larches Mindscape

Franconia Bog Larches Mindscape

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Our Time Comes

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Larches & Geese Mindscape

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