Fruit

Green apples at the grocery store today.

Layers

Green apples stacked for the taking at Stew Leoonard's.

July 28: Finally home again, albeit sans truck and camper--the one at the Dodge place in Oneonta, the other parked on my mother's front lawn. I found time to go to Bible Babes, stopping at the orchard on my way back. The apples were ripening nicely. Oddly enough, filters just didn't "stick" to this photo. I think it's the smoothness of the surface of the apples: nothing much changed with any of the color filters. So I went for a variation of selective color to make the fruit stand out.

The original photo is fairly ordinary, but I liked the simplicity of the colors. I wanted to bring out pure planes of color to play up that aspect. I used a combination of the Posterize and Cutout filters to achieve it.

As I was leaving work this evening, there was this wonderful light on the pillars of the highway overpass and there was no one behind me.I whipped out my handy point and shoot, pointed and shot--and got an error message that there was no memory. AAUURRRRGGHH! There was no memory because the memory card was back home, still stuck in the computer! By the time I got home, it was dark outside, and we had a few meetings to attend. I was feeling a bit of despair, when I spotted a bowl of fruit at the back of the room at one of the meetings. The comparison between the photo I wanted and the one I got is like...well, apples and oranges.

The Pencil Sketch effect brings out the barren, bony nature of the dormant trees.

Come spring, the words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins will apply here: "Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!" But right now, the apple trees are skeletal, patiently waiting out the winter in rows.

The Grain filter brought out the contrast between the odd apple and the others in the bin.

Saturday generally means a trip to Stew Leonard's, a sprawling grocery store that specializes in fresh foods. This red apple had fallen into the bin with the green Granny Smiths.