April is the month for wildflowers in Texas. Bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrush are blooming at the same time. On the way home a couple nights ago, we drove on Santa Fe and Whitehall Park was amazing.
Wildflowers
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Category Archives: Landscapes
Waco – Yellow Doors
Driving down Franklin, I have frequently noticed the large yellow doors on a building downtown. The building is red brick, and the yellow doors provide quite a colorful contrast.
The doors themselves have a great deal of character.
Waco VA Hospital
I took a little time off to try and get a good picture of the VA Hospital. It is always such a colorful and patriotic location with flags lining the driveway.
Cameron Park – Jacob’s Ladder and Clubhouse
I took an afternoon and went to Cameron Park. Jacob’s Ladder is a long stair that goes from the upper park area to the riverfront.
Cameron Park Clubhouse is a pavilion that can be rented for various functions.
Hwy 84
We took a small road trip a couple weeks ago to Nacogdoches. On the way home, we drove Hwy 84 most of the way. I stopped several places for some pictures, and ended up with some nice images.
I liked the contrast between the color of the shed and ramp and the surrounding winter vegetation here.
The way the overgrown vegetation was melding with this house was quite interesting. And, the two vultures on the roof were rather symbolic.
Seattle
I had the pleasure of spending a week in Seattle recently and was able to take lots of pictures.
This one shows their ferris wheel and the football and baseball stadiums.
This one is looking towards downtown from the top of the space needle.
This is the ferry across Puget Sound.
February Image Competition
Another image of mine received a second place in the Associate’s category of the Heart of Texas Professional Photographers Guild image competition on February 11. This is the original version.
However, in order to improve it for competition, I removed some of the distracting elements. The speaker, Mark McCall did a critique of all the images and suggested a couple of small additional changes. He also said that images should always have a border. So, that said, this is the final version of the image.
News and Awards
I entered this image into the January Heart of Texas Professional Photographers’ Guild image contest. I took second place in the Associate Member category.
Additionally, I received notification from ViewBug. They have a system of tallying the comments and responses and then produce a year-end summary. They said I scored in the top 20% of all users on their site.
Oak Leaf
While looking out the window, I noticed how the sun was shining on an oak leaf and thought it might make an interesting picture.
I used an 85mm f/1.4 lens to control depth of field so I could throw everything but the leaf out of focus.
Rainy Day
It rained pretty much all morning, and at times the rain got rather heavy. I looked out the back and saw water running off the oak tree and thought there might be a possible picture in it.
For this picture, I cropped the original, adjusted exposure and black levels, added contrast, sharpened it and added a vignette. Those are pretty much standard adjustments I make for any image. This fairly accurately represents the scene. Water can be seen dripping from the limb.
I took that image and converted it to black and white. This helped remove distracting areas of color, but almost seemed too sterile.
I went back to the original image and started by removing color saturation. That helped remove distracting areas of color. To give it a little more interest, I added a very light sepia tone to it.