Art Muse 2.0

Sunset in the graveyard of the trees

This scene is just down the road from our house. There is a collection of large, dead trees mixed in with live ones. The dead trees look like ethereal hands, reaching for the sky. Sometimes the tree is filled with vultures.

At sunset, if turns into this beautiful image.

Horse over my head # 4

This is the result of playing with a diffusion filter. It gives a very soft look to the picture. The picture of the weathervane over my studio was put into multiple layers in a photo editing program,. Then the individual layers were played with. As a last step, they were combined again into a single layer.

The result shows how diffusion can be combined with negative space to produce a fantasy image.

Message from the trees

This was originally a vertical panorama, shot in infrared, with the color shifted towards sepia. It was then cropped, duplicated and flipped to produce a mirror image, then pasted back together to produce the final image.

I added the dark gray border to give the effect of a Chinese scroll.

Sunset in the graveyard of the trees

This scene is just down the road from our house. There is a collection of large, dead trees mixed in with live ones. The dead trees look like etherial hands, reaching for the sky. Sometimes the tree is filled with vultures.

At sunset, if turns into this beautiful image.

A bug's world

This bug's eye view of the world takes place on one of the Hobbitt's sunflowers, back when we lived in New York.

There were gaps between the sunflower's petals where you could see other parts of the garden. Very distracting. So I filled in the gaps with petals from other parts of this image. Like most of my retouching, this was done to remove extraneous detail from an image, yielding a simpler image that's more interesting.

Ghost Train We found this blast from the past on a trip through the Amish country of Pennsylvania. In the town of Strasburg, there's a railroad museum and a functioning train, complete with steam engine that you can take a ride on. If you want, you can even have lunch while riding through the Pennsylvania Dutch countryside. After our ride, while walking through the rail yard, I spotted this switching engine silhouetted against a water tower.

Back at my studio, working on the computer, I created this version, which adds a glow that makes the engine look like something from the past projected into the present. I also darkened the rails a little bit, as they were bright and distracting

Birds of the castle

This is at the castle in Manzanares in Spain.

These birds were roosting on a small tree at the side of the castle. There were similar trees on the other sides of the castle as well, and the birds seemed to take turns, moving around to the different trees in some sort of rotation.

This particular tree, with the sun behind it, looked like the best angle. Unfortunately, the birds seemed to be hanging out on the other side of the castle. So I waited, and waited, and waited, for almost an hour, until the birds arrived at this perch.

And this was the reward for my patience. A lone bird caught in flight, lit from behind by the sun

Twisted George

This picture shows how I feel about getting squeezed by the government at income tax time.

I've often thought there should be a place on the tax return where you could say how you want your money spent, or at least some check boxes to select broad categories. For instance, you might choose to direct your tax dollars to education or health care or helping those in need or fighting the spread of disease in third world countries or helping to find alternative sources of energy or creating new jobs to help boost the economy.

That's what I would like. What about you?