Adicting

This is one of my favorite pictures. Those girls (all three) beautiful! This is just a whole lot of fun.

2nd Attempt

I'm loving my new found friend in Corel Painter X. This is my 2nd attempt and I learned well from last night and did frequent backups to the image as I went along. Here are several stages of the process.


The original image.



Added watercolor paints to the background.



Added Brush strokes to the hair for the watercolor effect.




Did the clothes.




And finally her face.

It's hard to see the difference in the blog but believe me there are a number of them since very little of the original print was left untouched and the parts that were was totally by mistake.
This was a lot of fun.

1st Attempt at art

So Monday night I had a group of students come to my home for some fun with a camera. I took over 400 images and part of them with the express purpose to have some to work with in learning how to use a program called "Corel Painter X". So on tonight's blog with this young ladies permission I am putting some of the steps I went through today while doing my first ever painting. I a not an artist and I am sure it will show but I am planning on learning so that this will take my portraits to a new level and my images of nature also to a new level.

Now for the images of just one of 6 beautiful young women that I photographed Monday. I will hopefully post more images of the others later.

Here is the image that I captured Monday.



These next three are part of the process steps.










The final Image, still not totally like I want it but for now I am finished. The color isn't as vibrant for some reason even though I had not changed it knowingly before uploading it with the others.

Scenes with a Theme

These are more images from Box Canyon in the Boulder Mountains of Southern Utah. These have a very simple them of Matching the Trees to the Mountains. Notice how all of the trees are unique and special just as the grandeur of the mountain cliffs amongst which they live.

Scout Camp Images

I am a Scouter of now going on 48 years. I started taking pictures at scout camp when I was a boy scout in the 1960's and have pictures somewhere from every camp since that time. I have taken pictures of other scouts on the trail ahead and behind me. I have pictures of my leaders on the trail,usually behind me. (There are three kinds of scouts, the gazelles, the cattle and the turtles. The Gazelles are always out in front getting lost while trying to loose their leaders. The cattle are in a herd right around the leaders and the turtles are always exactly 100 yards behind everyone else, not because they go slower but because they just walk 100 yards behind everyone else no matter how fast that group is going. Of course not every scout fits into one of these three groups but 99 % of them do.) I just happened to be a Gazattle, a cross between the gazelle and the cattle. I didn't want to get lost but I didn't want to be right in the thick of the dust either. Anyway so I started taking pictures at a pretty early age on scout outings. Well I kept it up after becoming an adult scout and trying to enforce the law that all scouts be cattle and stay between the leaders. (Never worked but it was a novel idea.) Anyway I also learned that to be somewhat on top of the activities that I would have to learn how to stay up late and get up early. That paid off many times because I would be up watching the wild animals while the other wild animals were still in their tents snoring. I think I have pictures of deer taken in the early morning from nearly every troop camp I have ever been on where there were deer to be seen. Anyway the images in this blog come from the other parts of the trips. This is the road going into Bristlecone Scout camp once owned by the Utah National Parks Council. I walked up it once at 3 pm with no water. What A DUMB thing. See adult scouters learn as well at camp.





These were all images taken from or around that camp on several different trips into that area.




The last two were from a Council Jamboral held in Utah Near Holden and Fillmore. It was dusty and dust devils like the one pictured happened nearly every day.


And this was from a Woodbadge Scout training camp in Southern Utah in an area called Apple Valley. It looked into the Zion's National Park area and had some fantastic sights to behold and of course photograph. This particular scene came during a snow strom that moved across the valley and left us pretty cold. (What else can you expect in early April?) However I wouldn't have missed it at all and would go through it all again just to see the beauty of Zion's after it left.  (The first three images on this blog that I made yesterday were all mages from this same camp.)

Color in the Skies

Sometimes I just sit in awe as I watch the colors of a beautiful sunset. Here are images (3) from a scout camp in southern Utah and one from Idaho. The third one had added color as I captured a reflection of the sunset on a hood of a vehicle parked in front of me. The last one was actually caused by a cloud of smoke from a fire with a mid-afternoon sun.