The Walled Garden at Biltmore

(This picture can be enlarged by clicking on it. Clicking a second time will make it full-sized.)

Biltmore House and Gardens is one of the favorite places My Beautiful Bride and I visit several times a year. We rarely tour the house, but we almost always visit the Conservatory and the Walled Garden. Both are beautiful any time of the year, and we never tire of visiting there.

I created the image above by playing in Photoshop with a photo of the Walled Garden taken several years ago. I tried to create an image that looked similar to a charcoal sketch or some other type of drawing while being at least somewhat realistic.

Advertisements

Lost Creek Falls

(This picture can be enlarged by clicking on it. Clicking a second time will make it full-sized.)

Betsy and I visited Lost Creek Falls here in Tennessee several years ago. It was a nice enough little waterfall, but I have never been impressed with the photos I got. So I recently played around in Photoshop with one of my photos and got this ‘painting’.  I rather like this.

Frederic Mistral Rose

(This picture can be enlarged by clicking on it. Clicking a second time will make it full-sized.)

Sometimes raindrops can make a beautiful rose even more beautiful. I captured the soft pink blossom of Frederic Mistral a couple of years ago, but I have never published it. I thought now was about time.

 

Terraces in Bali

(This picture can be enlarged by clicking on it.  Clicking a second time will make it full-sized.)

I visited Bali almost thirty years ago and found the island to be both beautiful and idyllic.  One of the sights I really enjoyed was all the terraces we saw as we toured the back roads of the island.

At that time I was taking photographs with slide film, and although the slides have degraded over the years, they still bring back wonderful memories.  This image is made from a scanned slide that was ‘tweaked’ in Photoshop to hide some of the damage.

Tulips

(This picture can be enlarged by clicking on it.  Clicking a second time will make it full-sized.)

We don’t have a large number of tulips in our yard these days (thanks to the chipmunks!), but the ones we still have are very pretty.  The photo of these tulips was taken two years ago, and I used Photoshop to help the photo look like a sketch.

Caesar’s Head Panorama

(This picture can be enlarged by clicking on it.  Clicking a second time will make it full-sized.)

A couple of weeks ago, Betsy and I stopped at Caesar’s Head State Park in South Carolina before hiking to nearby Raven Cliff Falls.  The views in the park were awesome.  I made this panorama from photos taken at the park overlook.  March 22, 2017.

Daffodil

(This picture can be enlarged by clicking on it.  Clicking a second time will make it full-sized.)

I’ve taken many photos of the daffodils blooming in our yard, but sometimes I like to play around with Photoshop to make the photo look more like a ‘painting’.  This is one of my attempts to become an ‘artist’.

Blue Sky, Icy Branches

(This picture can be enlarged by clicking on it.  Clicking a second time will make it full-sized.)

Betsy often encourages me to take “creative” photos.  I’m not sure how well I do at that, but I do try, even though I’m no artist.  I do enjoy ‘experimenting’ in Photoshop in an effort to be “creative” with so-so photos.  This image started as a photo of icy tree branches taken in our yard in February, 2015.

Up Close and Personal

(This picture can be enlarged by clicking on it.  Clicking a second time will make it full-sized.)

Betsy and I visited King’s Bluff Falls in February, 2013, on our visit to Arkansas.  The hike to the falls was pleasant, and, thanks to a zoom lens, I was able to get a close-up view of water going over the brink of the falls.  I tweaked the image in Photoshop to make it look more like a modern art painting.

A Little Snow for Betsy

(This picture can be enlarged by clicking on it.  Clicking a second time will make it full-sized.)

Since we never seem to get enough snow (according to Betsy) here in the Glade, I’m constantly on the lookout for pictures of snow to try to cheer her up.  There’s not a lot of snow in this image which I got way back in 1987 (it’s hard to believe that was 30 years ago!).  I was shooting slide film way back then, so this image is scanned from a slide made at the time.  The picture was shot at Juneau International Airport, where we made a refueling stop on a flight to Hong Kong.  It was taken in June, and I was on my first trip to China.