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:
