Growing up in Boston in the 50’s, I remember two summertime treats I could sometimes convince my dad to give us at the end of a long hot day in his upholstery shop: a trip to our favorite ice cream shop, and a trip to the “flying horses”. Back in the day, before freeways and …

I like to experiment using different styles when creating images: oil paints, pastels, chalk, pencil sketch. But the most elusive style, the holy grail that continues to elude me, is water color painting. Sometimes I feel like I’m getting closer, while at other times it seems like I’m no closer than when I began my …

I envy anyone who can pick up a pencil and transform a blank piece of paper into into a beautiful sketch. I wanted to produce a series of images in a pencil sketch style, using source images from the Great Smokies and nearby areas. There are Photoshop filters that will render an image with a …

Within the Great Smokies National Park, the Cades Cove loop is an 11 mile one way drive about one hour west of Gatlinburg (where A Boy Named Sue finally caught up with “the dirty, mangy dog” that named him Sue). There are many beautiful and historic old buildings that dot the trail. One building in …

I didn’t get out in the field much to gather new source material last year, so I’m revisiting images I worked on earlier to see how they come out using different techniques. The Arcadia National Park series is the first one where I’m forcing myself to simulate different mediums and styles on each image. Pastel, …

In an earlier post I described how one of the final steps of my workflow is to add what I refer to as structure lines to the image. The bottom half of the image below has structure lines but the top half does not. Moving the slider up and down will let you see the …

Often while visiting desert locations I come across worn and weathered trees. Their tangled and distressed branches fascinate me. “Some day I’ll do something with this” would always be my thought as I snapped an image or two. Well “someday” came recently resulting in the portfolio I have simply called Trees.  My first attempt working …

Let’s use this scene of a boat tied up at a pier in Morro Bay California to describe the steps that I take (called a workflow for true digital darkroom aficionados) and tools that I use when creating images. This is meant to be an overview of my process. Anyone interested in learning more about …