Pictures In The Night

Ray’s Blue.

That’s what an editor called it. It’s really carillon blue. Whenever I was working around dusk I would hope for it. This rarely happens in Southeastern Louisiana because of our never ending humidity.

Humidity is really composed of tiny drops of water that reflect red light. That tends to mute sky colors.

Normally.

On this day we had lot of rain. The skies cleared out a few hours before dusk. I looked outside and saw my blue. I photographed everything that I could. The tree was one of my first subjects. You know. Make a safety picture in case there is nothing else.

It was fine as it was. I did make a few better photographs. You’ll see one tomorrow.

You know me.

I can’t leave well enough alone.

I started tinkering. And, tinkering. And…

I finally reached the end result.

Here’s what I did.

I cleaned up the first picture and smoothed the blue sky to make it as close to what I saw when I looked up. The camera generated some noise, requiring smoothing. The picture was okay.

The second picture is the result of stripping the color image to black and white and layering it slightly askew over the first picture. This, too, is fine.

Then I decided to add a couple of other techniques and some grunge to it. The third picture is the result of that experimentation. Cool enough.

Finally, I wanted to add a little color just to see what would happen. So, I found a picture that I thought might work. It didn’t. I found the layer that you see on my third try. I fine tuned the layering and the result is as you see it.

I hope that gives you an idea of my working method and maturing vision. Any of these pictures would work. They’d be great as a quadric on your wall, Or, my wall. Hmmm… I wonder if this is a winnable battle.

Stay safe. Stay mighty. Enjoy every last drink. (If you live in New Orleans you were done at 6am today if you were drinking togo cups from a bar. That will return when we control the virus because right now we are number one in the country based on per capita.)