looking and seeing

my love of blue and gold continues

now that much of the immediate smoke has drifted away and we are left with a thick smudge of it on the horizon, the sunsets are duskier than usual, the blue shadows deeper and the pinks of sunset softened with the yellow tones of smoke in the air

a few nights ago i happened by the window at just right the moment and noticed this

if you click on it for an enlarged version you'll see the layering of the hills and mountains in the distance, quite notan-like i think

I do like the lack of definition the smoke provides 

i'm still playing with photo editing and layering images and decided to make a concerted effort to improve my photographs 

the local library had a few books on the subject and this one  Art With an iPhone had some beautiful images, mostly done within a variety of apps but there are also good suggestions for getting better initial shots and though i haven't had time to really dig in to it i tried working with one image a few days ago, just to get my feet wet

the photograph below was taken on a very cold winter morning in the yukon this past spring

27 below zero, the sun just coming up to the horizon

i switched to "silverlight" in iphoto

it's interesting to look at the differences between black & white, monochrome and silverlight - they're very subtle yet definite

i imported that into the app "distressed fx" to add a textured layer

a kind of "grunge" background that seems to bring back the original blue and yellow in a most interesting way and there are lines in the background that add so much interest yet they don't compete with the tree branches at all

i'm not so much interested in doing this as the endgame - i'm more interested in using it as an idea generator... a way to change things without being committed, to experiment and see how certain colours or textures might look and then to take that information and do my own thing

recently our son was in croatia for a vacation with his girlfriend and he sent me this image

it feels like i'm looking at the scene an old master would have drawn inspiration from for a painting - that sky! and the water... the slashes of pale blue in the left foreground... the row of weathered buildings with the hit of red in the centre

so much to learn from it i feel as though i could study for months and still see something new each time i look at it

the combination of blue and gold holds that kind of fascination for me - i've seen so many iterations of the two colours together, each one strikingly different

the more you look, the more you see