We have been busy around town in Phoenix lately, totally caught up in the hustle and bustle of urban affairs. For the moment, our idyllic life of rural RV travel feels very far away! However, all we have to do is stop and listen to the birds singing in the trees and grab a camera to capture a little beauty here and there, and the frenzy of city life subsides.
Mark found these lovely flowers while out on a walk the other morning…
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We get a huge kick out of messing with our photos, and there are loads of software tools out there that can give your photos a really fun twist. We use Adobe’s Lightroom software for managing our libraries of photos (we each take about 35,000 photos a year, so keeping track of all these photos is quite a job!). Lightroom is also a fabulous tool for touching up the photos so they look their best.
Some folks may feel that post-processing photos on the computer is “cheating,” but it is actually half of the skill set needed for making great images. Composition and exposure of the photo is only the first half, and the hours spent post-processing on the computer are comparable to time film photographers used to spend in the darkroom years ago. Ansel Adams was famous for spending days in his darkroom tweaking his photos, and he even wrote a book about it called The Print. Likewise, modern photographers spend days on their computers!
Mark recently took a photo of the side of a building in Phoenix that was interesting for its shadows and patterns:
This photo has some interesting lines and shapes…
He decided to play with it a little bit using a very cool software tool called Topaz Adjust. With just a few mouse clicks he transformed the photo from the one above to the one below.
…WOW !!
Yowza!! It looks like some exotic underwater scene in an aquarium! Of course, getting wild and extreme like this isn’t for every photographer or for every photograph, but it sure is fun to play with!!
We went out for a stroll the other evening and suddenly saw the sky go wild with vivid pinks and dark storm clouds. The clouds won the battle for the sky in the end, and they spritzed not just us but also our truck that Mark had just spent the day washing and waxing. Ouch! Oh well, spots on a perfect wax job is a small price to pay for such a stunning sunset!
What a sky!
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We’ve been very busy around town in Phoenix, Arizona lately, tending to some personal business rather than sightseeing, but the gorgeous Arizona sunsets have made us run for our cameras every time. We were blessed with yet another beauty two nights ago. This one lit up the sky between the palm trees in a friend’s back yard!
By the way, this lovely photo is proof that you don’t need a big, expensive, fancy camera to take pretty pictures. Mark took this with my seven year old 6 Mega Pixel Nikon D40. I retired it several years ago, after it had done me great service, including five magazine cover shots. You can find them on Craiglist for less than two hundred dollars.
A much better deal, though, is today’s entry level DSLRs which have more resolution and video — the 24 MP Nikon D3200 or the D3300 (which has built-in wifi).
It has been really fun for both of us to go back to using this older camera for a while, since our D40’s were our constant companions during our first four years on the road. We’ve learned a lot since then!
Posted October 16th, 2014 – Our travels have brought us back to Arizona where we have been very busy with friends and family for the last few days.
Arizona is a land of absolutely stunning sunsets, and we have seen some real beauties. I especially liked this one from the door of our fifth wheel trailer as we traveled through the Navajo Nation.
There is nothing like an Arizona sunset!!
Enjoy all our Quick Pics on one page here.
Posted October 13th, 2014 – We often see happy Europeans in rental RVs cruising around the scenic western states. Usually they are couples or families on vacation, traveling on their own or with one other RV.
However, the other day while we were stopped on the side of the road to get some photos, a fleet of six matching Coachmen Leprechaun Class C RVs from RoadBearRV.com suddenly pulled up behind us.
These guys were having a blast!
We ran over to say “hello,” and discovered they were a group of Germans on the trip of a lifetime. Their itinerary was taking them around some of the most scenic parts of Colorado during the most beautiful time of year when the aspens are ablaze with color. Their travel stops so far had included Denver, Estes Park and Aspen, and they were headed on to Durango, Telluride and Ridgway.
What a fabulous adventure, and what a great loop!!
Hey, what’s that cool rig coming towards us??
Posted October 8, 2014 – We looked up the road yesterday and saw this really fun looking rig driving towards us. It’s a “Flxible” RV — and that’s not a typo! These groovy antiques were made from the first to the last decade of the 1900’s. Check out the owners group and history of these special RVs here: Flxible Owners.