Lessons Learned: Reality? It's Art!

Mom and I were driving down the road toward Surrey, taking the long and scenic route to Deer Isle and Stonington when I spied these trees and brought the car to a stop.

The difficult lighting (high clouds, yielding soft, even blue light) that haunted me during this year's shoot was painfully in effect, but I could see something very colorful and magical there. The field was filled with wild flowers (a.k.a, weeds), the three stands of brightly colored young maples spewed their orange sprays upward over a background of yellow foliage. The natural composition of fluorescents and pastels was too good to pass up.

Photoshop came to the rescue (as it always does) to bring the resulting image up to my expectations, which regularly exceed the performance of any camera/film/CCD combination.

With only a typical amount of image tweaking, I reduced the blue tint and pumped up the natural colors to create the image I saw in my mind's eye on that gray day back in Maine.