Nature/Sundown

Sunset behind the reservoir in Southington that we pass on our way to church.

Camera: iPhone 4s Processing: minor adjustments in PSE

For Shayne

It's been a tough day. Tonight, we were at the wake of the 14 year old nephew of our best friends. He swerved his skateboard in front of a car. His favorite color was purple. The sunset tonight was a deep purple. Please pray for his family, and also for the person whose car he hit. And always remember that life is fragile.

This is the version of Hartford at Evening that I prefer. I don't know why it wouldn't upload properly from the iPhone as everything else has worked well, even the earlier version of this shot.

PINK: The steam rising from this smokestack glows in the light of the setting sun.

Sunset created a mauve glow in the northern sky as I was leaving work today with the naked trees traced delicately against it. Pencil Sketch simplified the silhouettes; then I applied a gradient based on the original colors behind it to create what looks like a woodprint.

This is the view of downtown Hartford from the parking lot at my office building, which is located way on the outskirts of the city by the Connecticut River, taken as the sun was dying in the west. There are fences, trees and a junkyard between us and the view. Cutout is becoming one of my favorite filters, especially for images like this one--it has a way of reducing it to the basic elements of light and color.

Today, we went to a craft fair where I took pictures of a puppet show and pictures of a funky artist doing a "flash painting" of a tiger...but then, on the way, we stopped at a supermarket. When we came out, the sky was on fire. We have had days upon days of grim grey weather, and then suddenly, there was this! I didn't alter the original other than to sharpen it a bit--this was the sky as we saw it. Dark Strokes deepend the color and intensified the sihouettes of the trees.

July 19: Sunset at Lake Superior. This photo won First Prize in Landscapes at the Berlin Fair this year, so I'm going to make an exception to the theme and just let it be as it is.

July 16: We crossed back into the US camping not far from the Canadian border at Grand Marais. We were lucky enough to find a campground right on Lake Superior. In this photo, gentle waves roll up on shore as the sun sets. I played around with Red Tint, Blue Tint and Colorful Center to create more of a moonlight effect.

July 15: We camped this night at Thunder Bay on a hill from which one could just barely see Lake Superior. As we went for our evening walk, the lowering sun lit up the trees. Accented Edges makes them glow.

This is November in Connecticut: the trees bare and teh sky barren. It reminds my of the lines in Shakespeare's sonnet:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

PSE allowed me to add some sunset color to the scene. I used Equalize to convert the original to stark black & white, then selected the black using Magic Wand. I saved the selection. I made a sunset gradient and applied it to cover the image, then loaded the selection and filled it with black.

We were waiting for our dinner guests to arrive when I looked out the window and saw this light in the western sky. The preternatural wind on Halloween tore the last leaves off the trees, so they are now November-bare. The sky behind them was suffused with this soft mauve light. An image this start doesn't give most filters much to work with, so I went played with some of the ones that create more radical effects. Neon Glow resulted in a rather striking effect almost like a negative.

July 7: At evening at our campground in Michigan, this tree was silhouetted against a soft sunset sky. It is a stark image, so it was hard to find a filter that worked with it. Instead, I made a gradient from the purple at the top and the pink at the bottom. I selected the black of the tree and applied the gradient to everything else. It defines the laciness of the tree, creating perhaps a silk screen effect.

Thank you to the 365ers--at the Berlin Fair today, I won a first, a second, a third and two fourths in the photography competition. Four out of five of the winners were taken specifically for the 365 project. The blue ribbon winner was this sunset taken at Lake Superior on our camping trip around the Great Lakes.

My trusty Nikon point and shoot needed to be replaced, so I went to Best Buy. When I bought the dearly departed, I was looking for small, the tinier the better. I wanted something that I could carry with me all the time. There was plenty of small there; but then I saw this Kodak Z915. Not tiny, but not bulky either, on sale and in the price range (i.e. had to be significantly under $200)--and it did a lot more than the Nikon equivalent of the damaged camera. So I went for it. This was all after work, and by the time I got home, made dinner, ate dinner and got back out, it was getting pretty dark. It wasn't the best time to try out a new camera, but it did a decent job of Paper Goods Pond at late evening. The Water Paper filter gives it an Impressionistic effect.

Today, John and I hiked to the left knee of the Sleeping Giant in Hamden CT. We got a bit lost in the woods on the way back, ended up hiking for four hours over steep rocky ground AND, when we got home, being accused by our teenager of being reckless and irresponsible. Is life good or what? The sun was setting as we limped back to our truck. A few stalwart picnickers were still enjoying the late summer evening. Dry Brush put just the right soft touch on the scene.

The weather today was sultry, to say the least. This family went to Paper Goods Pond to catch a bit of evening breeze. Intensifying the color at the top and softening it at the bottom evokes the mood of a still, humid summer evening down by the water.

Sometimes things don't work out the way one intends. The photos I took of the first crocuses in our yard were all out of focus. Fortunately, as we were driving past the reservoir this evening, there was no one behind us so we were able to pull over to get a shot of the sunset. It's not really a very exciting picture. As I was clicking through the filters, I ran across the Stained Glass filter. I'd never thought it would be useful for anything; but it transforms this rather standard sunset into a pointilist painting, making the water sparkle and highlighting the glowing rim of cloud.

It's light outside when I get out from work now, but the sun is still low enough to shift the sky to look like the inner curve of a dampened seashell. Combining the Posterize filter with the Pencil Sketch effect brings out the shifting colors of evening.

It's subtle, but using the Colorful Center effect (and then erasing some of it) focuses the attention on the place where the lowering sun lit the trees. It looks much more like what my eye saw this evening than what the camera actually recorded.