Exceptionally Good Vision

I am finishing up my birds of prey images.  So many great portraits,  it seemed a shame to have them by themselves when I could bring them all together for a nice fond memory of the day.   All for ambasadors from the
Black Land Prairie Raptor Center

This image is a montage of the 4 birds layered on top of a texture from Bob Ross.  His texture was then used again over the final composition to create the soft blending and light.  

End of Season Color

A photo prompt brought me outside with my macro lens to see if I could capture some of that vibrant color only fall can bring to the leaves turning color.  I found some great leaves and also some great seed pods from my flowers.  These are marigold petals and some seeds which truly appear to be tiny paint brushes and the pallet of an artist.  Texture by R H West.

Great White Heron

Sunday at the Refuge was once again magical.  Saw pelicans again but it was disappointing they were so far out, they are in the hundreds now.  The care takers of the refuge have plowed and planted the winter wheat and green things for the snow geese and other birds coming through this winter and it might explain why some of the Great White Herons were not in the blue grey waters.  The light was a bit harsh in the morning, not that awful bright sunlight but hazy harsh light, however  it did the most amazing thing to the wings in this photo as it shined on them making the wings like transparencies and you can see the bones!  Cheers

Sunrise Wading

Boy I am energized again over my photos.  Saturday I gave a talk at Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge on my photo art, textures and working with layers.  I think everyone had a great time as we had a lot of laughing and questions and over all fun.  It was really windy out on the waters edge and yet I managed to get a couple interesting shots.  I of course am never happy to just go with the flow so I tried something different with this little image of the egret.  I have been playing with some HDR from photomatrix I got to wondering if I could treat the hdr image like a texture and blend it onto my original image.   Well, yes you can!   So this original image was not taken in braket mode ( that is to say there were not 3 shots taken of it) I used a single image and let the photomatrix just make a map toning copy for me.    I was totally blown away with the end result.  I love how the little sunflowers and green weeds brought so much color into a rather boring blue and muddy grey image that is pretty normal when you are taking shots of white birds, and water. 

Now with some new excitement and ideas its time to look through my old photos again.

What Fun Is This ~ Dragonfly

Last weekend I got to visit Loy Lake, a little small secluded water area loaded with water lilys that were blooming.  I was surprised with so few birds to see, only one Green Heron and one Double Breasted Cormorant.  The dragonfly population was not fairing to well with the high winds over the last week and many were staying to the deep grasses and just clinging onto the foliage.  This one appeared to have his wings stuck together but later we could see they were not but he held them in an upright position making for a very unusual photo.

Tenecales

I can't  remember what this was except its in my set of weeds from the day I set out early in the morning before the pasture was hayed looking for textures in the plant life and weeds.  It has lots of great little hairs and spiny things along with the crinkled leaves and long spiky fingers.  Here is was given a light treatment in PS.