backyard birds and blooms, trailrun, saguaro permutations

Spring continues here in the Sonoran Desert...

Some doves built a nest in our backyard; it's amazing how fast the chicks grow--I took the two photos below with my iPhone5, just six days apart:

The nest is up under the patio roof--kind of dark there...

snapseed is perfect for 'brightening up the exposure--

before-and-after:

A few feet from the patio, a ferocactus in fiery bloom: 

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Now, for trailrun scenes: 

down by the creek in Sabino Canyon this morning: 

bees loving the palo verde trees in bloom:

hedgehog cactus starting to bloom on the exposed hillsides:

(I have yet to get one of those macro clip-on lenses for the iPhone;

you can get remarkably close almost-'macro' shots by just holding still

and selecting the focus area on the touch-screen.)

above Sabino Canyon, lined with cottonwoods getting greener each day,

some glorious ocotillo in bloom:

The clarity of the scarlet blooms against the sky got me thinking that this scene would be a good candidate for a particular 'grunge filter' effect that I like: photographically real images imposed on a texture that mimics parchment or heavy watercolor-paper, for a pseudo-illuminated-manuscript effect:

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And now for some saguaro permutations--

using symmetry and isolation against the sky

for a surreal effect.

Here's the original shot,

of my favorite pair of saguaros

near Sabino Canyon:

Cropping the tops,

then using (actually, repurposing) PicFrame app

in order to get a mirror image:

...and then re-cropping 

and re-mirroring the image to end up with this:

...again--

imposing the photographically-real

on a texture that evokes older methods of illustration,

using the 'grunge filter' in snapseed...

...and one more,

a color version:

In this week's JUXT showcase, "not quite twins"

I'm so honored to have one of my images featured in this week's "1000 Word showcase" by the team of mobile artists JUXT:

I took this just over a week ago, down at the Mission San Xavier (the same day I took the photos for the previous post.)..."Forced" to come up with a title when I submitted it to JUXT's Flickr group, I ended up with "not quite twins."  

Below is what I wrote for the showcase, including how I created the image:

A few days ago I was able to leave work earlier than usual–a clear and warm spring afternoon–so I decided to go down to the Mission San Xavier del Bac. I hadn’t been in a while, and It’s only a 15 minute drive from downtown Tucson; the combination of desert sky, Native American culture and 18th-century Spanish colonial architecture is endlessly photogenic. The Mission was originally founded in 1692, and the present structure dates from the 1780′s. The twin-towered facade is dominated by simple Moorish-influenced towers flanking an intricate Baroque entryway. The eastern tower was never completed–to my eye, it’s the asymmetry that makes the proportions more interesting. (The almost-symmetry of human faces is what often gives us visual personality, and it’s fascinating to find it in man-made structures.) The whitewashed towers with crisp shadows against the afternoon sky reminded me of some of Belgian painter Magritte’s famously surreal scenes–which made me want to experiment with isolating some of the Mission’s architectural details against the sky.

First I used Michael Baronovic’s (@MishoBaranovic) new Perspective Correct app to straighten the lines of the towers. Then I cropped the bottom, ‘ground’-half, off. Using PicFrame app, I ‘mirrored’ the remaining facade, eliminating the frame between the two sections of the vertical diptych, resulting in a seamless, symmetrical, floating-in-the-sky structure. For the rest, I used snapseed. I de-saturated the image, then used the grunge filter, choosing a texture that I find mimics parchment or handmade-paper. I like the juxtaposition of photographically realistic detail imposed on a background that evokes old surfaces used for illuminated manuscripts and East Asian scroll paintings. Finally, I warmed the temperature a bit to get a sepia tone, finishing with the center focus tool for a vignette effect.

(Last November was when I first started to play around with using cropped symmetry for a surreal effect. To see those first experiments, click here.)