The Digital Photo Guy

I’m writing this update from Anza-Borrego Desert State Park where I’m getting ready to go look for wildflowers. Yesterday, on my way back from Arizona, I stopped by Joshua Tree NP and drove as far north as Conttonwood campground. There are definite signs of a spring wildflowers but they’re still pretty scrawny. The desert lupines are sparse and standing about 4″-5″ tall where past displays have been thick and lush, standing 10″-12″. There were lots of chia that looked as if they had been killed by a frost and the live ones seemed pretty forlorn.

A weathered, leathered desert rat of the female variety flagged me down and told me the road ahead was washed out. She and her older but very well maintained RV were camped just outside the south entrance to Joshua Tree NP. By her reckoning, the full spring wildflower display wouldn’t happen for for another 2-3 weeks.

To the east of JTNP, below 2000′ elevation, the bloom was in full swing. Along the freeway, I could see bladderpods, brittlebush, sand verbena, chuparosa, desert lupines, California poppies (in AZ they’re called Arizona poppies, duh!) and other SCBs (small colorful bushes).

Here are some lupines I found just outside my RV this morning as I made photos of the sun rising over the mountains to the east. The sand verbena and desert gold were along Henderson Canyon Road in Borrego Springs.

I removed a dead stalk in front of the lupines using the Clone Tool and cropped to remove the RV parked next to me. Otherwise, I just adjusted Levels. I didn’t even have to remove dust bunnies. The sand verbena and desert gold were cropped, levels adjusted and sharpened.

On my way to Bosque del Apache, NM, I stopped by JTNP to check wildflower conditions. At the southern end, most of the vegetation is nicely turning green with spots of early bloomers such as this bladderpod.

On the way home, I came across  I-8 along the southern route through Tucson. That route was already in full bloom with lots of brittle bush, sand verbena, Arizona poppy and others that I couldn’t identify at 65MPH.

Some recent reports say Anza-Borrego State Park has already started peak bloom and anyone waiting much longer may miss it. Bottom line, it looks like Joshua Tree NP around the middle of March will be perfect for that area.

If you can’t go to Anza-Borrego, consider my JTNP Spring Desert Wildflower Photoshoot on March 21 or 22.

I’m back from Bosque del Apache and I have a pile of stuff on my desk so I thought I’d first goof off. Here’s a photo I took at BdA on Saturday, 2/21 before Artie Morris’ IPT started on Sunday. This is the quintessential BdA photo of a snow geese blast-off. Unfortunately, all those cars and people in the frame make it less than ideal.

Playing around a bit with Photoshop CS4, I created this photo.

Let me know what you think. BTW, this isn’t one of my masterpieces so I didn’t put a lot of effort into ehnancing the actual photo to remove all the reflected legs in the water. This is essentially a POC (proof of concept) as it were.

A reader asked how to remove the magazine from the following photo. Like all PS/PSE techniques, there are multiple ways to accomplish this so I whipped up a quick, easy fix for this problem. Here are the original and final photos. Click to see a larger image.

Remove the magazine

Magazine removed

First, I duplicated the background layer by pressing Control+J. Next, I selected the the magazine using the polygonal lasso tool. Remember, in the polygonal lasso tool, simply click the start point and move the mouse to the end point and a straight line will be drawn between the 2 points. The selection now protects the rest of the photo so you can make changes inside the selection but it won’t spill over into the area outside the selection.

Finally, I used the clone stamp tool to clone parts of the fabric over the magazine. When the magazine was completely filled, I pressed Control+D to remove the “marching ants”.  I could see the edge of the selection so, using the clone stamp tool, I blended the edges and ended up with the photo on the right.

Holy mackeral! Can you believe that it’s been nearly 2 weeks since my last update. I deserve 30 lashes with a roll of Kodak Tri-X.

I meant to update every night during my recent IPT (Instructional Photo Tour) with Artie Morris at Bosque del Apache. However, taking a workshop with Artie is a bit like boot camp. We were up at Oh-Dark-Thirty each morning and on site by 0600 (that’s 6AM for non-bird photographer types). We shot until about 1030 and then retired to the motel conference room for lunch and critiques or Photoshop sessions. Afterwards, it was back to the refuge from about 3PM until past sunset. Dinner was another marathon critique or lecture session. By the time I got to bed around 10:30PM, updating my blog was low on my list of priorities.

As I said in a previous post, if you can keep up, you’ll learn more from Artie in 3 days than you’ll learn from any other photographer in 6 months. I’ll post some photos as soon as I recover and have a chance to review about 1200 photos.

In the meantime, a former student asked about removing an object from a photo and replacing it with a similar texture. I said I would develop the steps and post them here but that plan obviously went by the wayside. I’ll try to get to it ASAP when I get home. (I’m posting this from a truck stop in Eloy, AZ).

The Comments still aren’t working because I haven’t had time to harangue my developer. I’ll get on that also when I get home.

Obviously, there was no MMT this past week while I attended Artie’s boot camp.