cactus blooms, palace scenes, and a New England lighthouse

From earlier today,

some prickly pear cactus buds and blossoms

in the mountains around Tucson:

(some tilt-shifting to concentrate

the focus on the blooms and buds,

and a bit of vignette, using the center focus filter)

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In the last posting, I played with a snapshot

of the Throne Hall in Gyeongbok Palace in Seoul;

Here's another angle of the same grand, upswept building,

 still going for the 'scroll background' effect:

This is a 'transplanted' photo; I took it on my Canon,

then e-mailed it to my iPhone in order to snapseed it;

below is the original shot--late afternoon shadows made the

main façade very dark:

So, a bit of selective tool brightening and color-saturating,

and then de-saturating the sky before 

using one of the 'grunge' filters

to end up with the 'scroll effect' version.

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Another palace photo, 

showing an overview of one of Seoul's minor palaces--

this one taken with my iPhone on my last day in Korea last summer

--this is the view over the main courtyards of 

Changgyeong-gung Palace:

I had climbed to the rooftop terrace garden

of Seoul National University's Cancer Hospital

across the street from the palace in order to get this view,

and just then, the drizzle began to turn into a downpour...

The umbrella adds a certain effect,

but crop it out, and the focus is more on the architecture:

Using one of the grunge filters again,

this time I was aiming more for nostalgia instead of a 'scroll-painting' effect:

 Looking at it now, there's more blur than I would like on the sides...

will do some more tweaking later...

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To finish for this week,

a shot of what is perhaps the most-photographed-lighthouse in America,

the Portland Head Light

in Cape Elizabeth, Maine:

This is another 'transplant;'

took this with my Canon a few summers ago,

e-mailed it to my iPhone a few days ago, 

and again, with the grunge filter 

(which seems to be my 'flavor of the month' right now),

I played around and ended up with this:

The crispness of the image contrasted with the watercolor-paper-feel of the background--

a combination that lends itself to a coastal scene...