Petroplyphs Near Tularosa

Been having fun with some old pictures today. These are petroglyphs at a state park near Tularosa NM.

This was taken during massive rains about a year and a half ago. That's probably the coolest thing about the picture-how green the desert looks here. It's usually a wasteland.

Nosara Sundog

Got a request this morning for more ocean scenes. I don't think I have many of those, having done most of my photographing in Colorado, NM and Utah!

Here is another one from my trip to Costa Rica about eleven years ago. This is Nosara again, and I hope the sun dog, a reflection created after the sun goes below the horizon on the ocean, shows up.

Nosara Scene

We mentioned Latin America in the last Wild Heather e-mail we sent out, and it made me nostalgic for warm weather and humidity-this winter is really obviously getting me down.

Here is a picture I took about 11 years ago in Nosara, Costa Rica.

Barn out on the plains

My friend Chaz and I drove out onto the plains the other day and I took this picture of an old barn.
I like the way the "No Trespassing" sign stands out on the front.

Vireo??

Here is another view of what I thought was a flycatcher and now think is a vireo. You can see the bars on the wings, the yellow around the throat and breast and the lack of an eye ring.

Western Flycatcher?

This little guy has been at our feeders all week, and chasing bugs in the pine tree outside our window.

I thought he was a western flycatcher but there's no ring around the eye. Now I'm starting to think he's a yellow throated vireo.

Anybody have a clue?

Merry Christmas-What a difference a day...

Here is another view out our back door in Monument-but it looks a lot different tonight.

We are having a bit of a blizzard today.

Merry Christmas!!

Here is a picture I took last night looking out our back door in Monument. Nice sunset and the end of a pleasant, relaxing day.

Pecos Night Sky

This is the sky over Pecos National Forest near Santa Fe in New Mexico. I went out on a very cold moonless night, set up the camera on a tripod and opened up the shutter for about 45 minutes.
This was film, by the way. You supposedly can't do this long an exposure with digital-it creates a lot of digital "noise." This is one of the few film shots I've taken in the last 4 years.

Birds at Feeder

Just sitting here having the last of my morning coffee watching the birds come to our feeder outside the breakfast nook.
It's funny-there's this image of nature photographers being tough outdoor types in their LL Bean khakis roughing it in the jungle to take pictures. Some of us are schlubby middle aged guys sitting in our breakfast nooks drinking coffee, listening to jazz on the stereo, doing crosswords and letting the birds come to us.
The wind is starting to come up, as it does here in Monument, and the feeder is swinging like a pendulum, so that may be it for the day.

Golden Christmas Lights

Here is one I took along the river walk in Golden last week. It was snowing and the Christmas lights were quite pretty.

I just got a new camera-an Olympus Evolt 510, and so far I am pretty pleased with the results.

More Fun With Filters

This is a picture that some of my more faithful blog followers may remember.

I applied a filter (plastic wrap) to it in Photoshop Elements 5 (nope, still haven't gotten Elements 6 yet).

I've been submitting some pictures to a photo stock company over the last few weeks and they seem to like stuff like this.

Monument Miner

Here is kind of a fun picture I took on Monday of a sculpture outside of Peoples Bank in Monument.

More Fun With Photoshop

I have been working with filters in Photoshop Elements 5 (haven't gotten the new one yet). This is a picture of some bricks at my friend Chaz' house in Santa Fe. The finished version is the top one after editing and applying the "Stained Glass" filter.

The original is below.

Heather is thinking of submitting this as a possible fabric sample.

Monument Rock

I needed a local picture for a calendar we are putting together so I went up and took this picture of Monument Rock.

I think I will take many pictures of this place.

Betraying my "secrets"

Here is the original sunset that I pasted into the photo below via Photoshop.

Santa Feans might recognize Tetiya Peak.

Canyonlands Sunset

Here is a picture I have been struggling with for over 10 years. It was taken in Canyonlands-that's my cousin Tim and friends C-Bill and Barnes from left.

I didn't fire the flash when I took the picture so the foreground was too dark and the background was completely burned out. This was one of the first pictures I ever had scanned and worked with in my very first consumer version of Photoshop (way before Elements). I didn't have much success with it at the time, but now I know a lot more about using layers. I seperated the foreground and background into two layers and pasted a better sunset into the back and lightened the foreground. I also made the foreground a little more red to give it some unity.

It came out rather nice I think.

More Scrub Oaks

Here's some more.

Scrub Oaks

Once again I have ignored my blog for weeks and as usual it took a few people mentioning it to me to get me started again.

I took this one today-I was hiking up through some scrub oaks near Monument-Heather gave me the day off.

I like the detail in this picture.

Cosmo

Still at the shop with Heather. I was going through some pictures I took last month and this one caught my eye. This will probably end up on one of our card sets.

Back in Niwot

I just took this picture near Niwot while Heather is teaching. Now I'm sitting in the back of Cottonwood Quilts listening to an old Max Roach/Clifford Brown while Heather presides over show and tell and working on some pictures.
I'm rusty. I didn't realize the camera was set on a low pixel setting when I started taking these pictures, then I let the batteries die on me...
This one came out nice though.

Sunflower

Here is another Quiltography quilt we are working on. The finished product is a wall hanging about 4 by 3 feet. I had to divide the photograph into 4 different sections because we can only print 8.5x11 sheets. For now anyway.

Heather's always getting me to do things I have never done before-the new Photoshop was a big help in this one as well as the Drella quilt.

Finished Product

Here is the finished quilt from those flowers that I manipulated in Photoshop last week. It's called "Flowers for Drella." We are kitting it out and it should be available tomorrow at the store.

It came out pretty nice I think.

Galisteo Cemetary

Here is another picture I used Levels in Photoshop Elements to manipulate. I'm going to use it as an example in the class I am teaching tomorrow.

Here are a couple of samples from our latest creation in progress, which will end up being a quilt kit available in the shop and on our site. I'm not sure what the finished product is going to look like-you may want to keep an eye on the site or this blog for updates. Heather says it will look kind of freaky-I think it will look very freaky.
I started in Adobe Photoshop Elements with a photograph of a white Cosmo, which I separated into 3 levels of the background, the petals and the the center of the flower. I changed the background into black and white, and used the color replacement tool to change the color of the petals, then left the center of the flower the original yellow in each photo. There are five more flowers in other colors for the quilt.
If you would like a detailed explanation of the techniques of selection, color manipulation and the use of levels in Adobe Photoshop Elements, I highly recommend "Photoshop Elements for digital photographers" by Scott Kelby. I got my copy at Borders in CO Springs.
I printed these pictures on fabric yesterday and turned them over to Heather. Who knows what the finished product will look like? Check back for updates-we will post it on the site and here when it is done.

Sorry again for being so negligent on the blog lately. We moved and then both got sick and the shop is crazy as usual-but things have settled down somewhat.

Maybe.

Quiltography

Quiltography, also referred to as photos on fabric, is something Heather and I have been working with all year. One of the most common questions people ask us is "what kind of a printer works best for photos on fabric?"
The simple answer is that an ink jet printer is the only kind of printer that works with fabric. It's the most common kind of printer used in the home-most of our readers probably already own one. You don't want to even attempt photos on fabric with a laser or an old dot matrix printer-it will not work. Laser printers use heat to set the ink and will damage fabric (and probably your printer)
You can get decent to excellent results with any color ink jet printer. Be sure to use the highest quality image print settings when you try a print-if your printer has a photo setting use that.
To get the best prints-the kind of prints you may have seen on our quilts-you will want to use a photo dedicated ink jet printer. These are built especially for photographs. They do an ok job on text but are really made for photographs. They are not necessarily expensive-the printer we use, an Epson Stylus Photo, cost about $80. You should shop carefully and beware of "bells and whistles" such as card readers and print preview screens that you may not need. Epson makes excellent photo printers as does Canon, HP and Lexmark.

Lake by Molas Pass

We drove over Molas Pass from Durango to Silverton yesterday and stopped at this lake. The weather wasn't the best but it made for an interesting sky.

Here's what the sky looked like from the opposite direction as the thunderhead in the previous post.

I have a favorite place to photograph sunsets south of Santa Fe. Theses two pictures were taken from that place.

Santa Fe Thunderhead

I went out to photograph the sunset yesterday evening in Santa Fe and was surprised by this thunderhead.
That's one of the cool things about NM sunsets-sometimes is even more beautiful in the opposite direction.

Harry's Honeysuckle

Hello from Santa Fe! Actually Heather is in Santa Fe teaching today and I am goofing off at my friend's office in Albuquerque.

Here is some Honeysuckle (I think) from the patio at Harry's Roadhouse in Santa Fe. We had lunch there yesterday afternoon. The patio and the food are wonderful there.

Entish Tree

If you've seen Heather's kit at the store called "Entish Tree" you may recognize this. It's the same tree from a different angle. This another scan of an old photo.

That's it for today. We are getting ready to go to Santa Fe for the weekend and beyond. Heather is teaching Friday and Saturday and then we are taking the scenic route back through the mountains for a few days. It'll be our first break since early spring. We need it.

I plan on taking many pictures over the next few days and will try to post if possible.

Nosara Beach

This is another scan of an old picture. This is the sun going down over Nosara Beach in Costa Rica in 1996. Awesome place.

Swans

These are trumpeter swans that I photographed near the Skagit River in Washington State back in the last century.
I've been working on scanning old favorite photos into digital.

Has it been almost two weeks since I last updated my blog?!! Is there anybody left out there?
I survived a near computer disaster in that time, and let a bunch of flowers die, and sorted out an e-mail nightmare at work along with forgetting about the blog-so here are several new pictures-I do feel guilty.
This is a bee on a sunflower that I photographed last weekend at Red Rock Canyon. The background was kind of blah so I changed it to black and white.

Monument flower

Took this on second street in Monument a day or two ago.

Baby Owls

My friend Chaz in Albuquerque discovered these 3 (one is peeking on the right) baby screech owls in his backyard a couple of summers ago.
They were just about ready to start flying when this was taken.

Sacred Heart

This is an old church in Nambe NM. I took this several years ago-the original may have been on film.
It's a beautiful old church that I have photographed many times, starting on my first trip to NM when I was 7 or 8 years old.

The sun was hitting these cosmos in front of the store in an interesting way yesterday evening so I took a few quick pictures.

It's a violation of a major photographic rule to shoot things that are backlit.

Somtimes you can get some nice results when you break the rules.

Blue Sands

This is White Sands almost exactly a year ago during the New Mexico monsoon.

It actually was a monsoon this day-the interstate between Las Cruces and El Paso was shut down by flooding.

One day without rain and we've all cranked up the complaints about the heat! Remember when it was snowing non-stop about six months ago and we were all pining for summer?

We could (and some of us did for 15 long years) be living in TX.

Texans get a day where it's "only" 91 degrees and the humidity is under 50% this time of year and they're all saying; "Damn-if it could only be like this all the time."

Texans, of course, insist that they like it that way...

Here are a couple of flowers from our front yard in the Springs. These are tiny tiny little things-only a few millimeters across.















This one is much larger, and looks like something's been eating on it.

Reds and Daisies

As I write this yet another giant thunderstorm is advancing on Colorado Springs.

I guess the drought is over. It's made for a great wildflower season.

Here's some more of those flowers I thought were Penstemons until one of Heather's students straightened me out.

They look like penstemons-I'll bet hummingbirds love them as much as penstemons-they look like they evolved to be pollinated by hummers.

There's not much special about this shot-it's just a very cool back road that goes from Monument to Woodland Park near Pikes Peak.

These flowers are right outside the door of our shop in Monument. Once again I am taking pictures while Heather is teaching.

These flowers were from our wedding in June. I planted them in pots we have at the store.

Sticky Geranium

Here's another shot taken during the brightest part of the day.

And I finally got around to buying a wildflower guide-although I'm still admittedly a novice in that area.