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:

featured: architecture in Los Angeles...and saguaro blooms

This week, a snapseeded photo ('transplanted') featured on the afar.com homepage:   

(always a thrill to be published!)

--and here's the highlight:

I took the photo a few years ago, pre-iPhone,

and then the other evening, going back through some things,

I thought this scene would benefit from just a bit of tweaking--

just a little of bit of vignette to soften the edges

and pull the eyes even more toward the sky in the middle...

So--a 'transplanted' snapseed,

taken with a Canon, then edited with snapseed...

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This morning, after I finished my Sabino Canyon run,

I grabbed my iPhone out of the car

and went back to take a few photos--

this year, a few weeks earlier than usual,

the saguaros are already blooming:

The cacti can be decades old before they start blooming,

and each hand-sized bloom stays 'fresh' for only a day;

bats and doves love to pollinate them...

The blooms are often hard to photograph since they're usually on the arm-tops,

but occasionally, you get a low-reaching limb:

  

(tilt-shift and center-focus filters used on all of the saguaro photos above)

Saguaros aren't the only cacti blooming;

cholla flowers are coming out too...

(no filters used here--just cropped)

Summer's almost here...and the thermometer is climbing...