New Shasta pic

I shot this picture this morning, using my telephoto zoom at its maximum and shooting between power lines and the highway. The morning light was just too irresistable to not take the few minutes. You might want to open this picture in a new window and zoom in our all the glaciers and crevasses. Enjoy!

Another Yosemite Falls video

Because of a timely request, I've found another video from that amazing spring day in Yosemite Valley. I found a spot where few tourists go and got a different angle than most people see of Lower Yosemite Falls. The rest of the world melts away, with all your senses on "natural overload".

Back on the road

I'm back for another tour in beautiful Dorris, California, just 5 miles from the Oregon border. Here's a leftover picture from the first tour. The big sky and wide open spaces are so different from the mountain forests where I live. As you can see below, their sunsets are just amazing.

On the long drive out to the job site, I saw this old thing actually being used! I just had to stop and take a few pictures of this very interesting old road grader.

This must have been a top-of-the-line model in its time. Looks like it wasn't built for comfort, though.

Finally, I have another leftover from the previous tour. The mountain looks VERY different today than when I took this one. A summer snow storm came through and covered the mountain from head to toe with a new 6-10 inches of new snow!! I'll just have to wait until the time is right to go out and get a new Shasta picture. Maybe this evening there'll be another great sunset (?)

Half Dome and half-truths

Well, I just had to experiment more fully with the sky substitution spazzing so, here it is, maybe not quite out of my system, yet. With all the sky shots and sunset pics I have, I should never run out of different combinations. Here is a series of Half Dome shots with different skies pasted into them.

I like the really fine wisps along the edges of the clouds. On these days, I'm going to try to make the rest of the picture look like it has those great orange-ish hues, as well. I'll have to try to make the perfect "fake".

This last one is an attempt at "art", with me doing all kinds of creative adjustments, selections and treatments. Don't ask me how to reproduce the effect(s). I'm still just a beginner and I'm sure to get better at it. I've always liked how those trees looked after an "artsy filter" drybrush treatment.


I see this type of thing becoming my retirement "work", which will hopefully supplement my pension stuff. I started a list as to what I need to do and what I want to offer in Fotoware products.

New! Now with better sky!

Although I am kicking myself now for working on a JPEG version of this, I know that with these results, it will be worth the effort to come up with a hi res version. I ended up having to do quite a bit of hand painting around the tree limbs. If you look closely, you'll still see some remaining bits of the old sky, which replaced the original sky. I really like how I was able to place the horizon in this sky clip exactly where the horizon is at the mountains in the background. Sure, someone can say "How come the tree has a shadow and the sun has already gone down?"

Yeah, life is full of mysteries and some should stay that way!

My First Panorama

I didn't do too awfully bad with this picture of Cloud's Rest and Half Dome (right), considering I didn't level my camera and tripod or lock in the exposure controls. So, I just took an hour of well-spent time to attempt to correct for all those mistakes. I replaced the sky with a pixel color I had plucked out of the picture. It took awhile to manually paint out the groups of pixels that didn't get selected. I also tried to crop out the most glaring of "seams" that didn't quite line up correctly. You can still see them if you look for them. I'm also seeing a little more touch-up work where the mountains meet the sky.

All in all, it's a promising technique I'll have to try again.