Rocks – Decaseconds

A Return Trip to Brazil

2023-Oct-112023-Oct-09 adohertyhLeave a comment

New adventures in color grading have brought me back, much as I did with images from Spring 2012, to my Fall 2012 trip to Florianopolis, Brazil. Big changes in how I tackle challenging raw images have produced a drastically different outcome to my photoprocessing.

The dark rocks and chaotic waves come through in a whole different way.

So, too, does this sculpture stretched over the water—the purpose of which, if there is one, I’ve still not ascertained.

There’s a sense of texture and place that a dark ocean and bright beach convey together.

I can still remember wandering back to my room at the end of the evening, feeling like I was a visitor to an alien world.

Trio vs. Trio

2023-Jan-162023-Jan-15 adohertyhLeave a comment

I found myself returning to one of my earliest Decaseconds posts (almost exactly 11 years ago) as I updated my Top 32 album on Flickr—the digital portfolio where I display my best (or simply favorite) photographs. Finding “Waves and Rocks Dwarf Man” in that set, I saw both the excellent light and composition that my old Nikon had captured in 2011, as well as all of the places where my choices in processing the original image now left my unsatisfied. Rather than simply reprocessing that original image, I went back to the folder of camera raws from that day and selected an image I took just moments later to tackle. (Always keep save those raw files!) I not only like this composition better than the older one, but I also feel that I have brought something new out here, rather than simply reprocessing something old.

Clear Sky Expanse

2022-Apr-06 adohertyhLeave a comment

The Thanksgiving evening was perfectly clear, as late-autumn evenings in the desert often are, and I felt like I could see forever: stones and brush in the foreground, over the Pines to Palms Highway, across the irrigated valley floor, before slicing the final bits of sunlight off the tops of the Little San Bernardino Mountains.

Little Waterfalls in Fall

2022-Apr-012022-Mar-31 adohertyhLeave a comment

Earlier this week, I posted an image that used long exposure to contrast textures in a landscape. This image achieves a similar goal, but perhaps with even more drama and structure. The oblique lighting from the blue-hour sky exaggerates the sheets of stone that have been thrust forth from the Earth.