Arizona dreaming

With the cold moving in today I finished up some of my photos from our trip a week ago to Arizona.  Missing the 70+ weather already!   One of the fun moments there was while visiting friends in Green Valley.  Their backyard opens on the edge of a deep desert ravine and so the wild life comes right up into the backyard.  Of course I love birds and so got an opportunity to fire off some shots of several different types from what we see here in South Dakota.

Playing with photoshop

One of my goals this year is to get better with processing of my images in Photoshop.  So today with the snow coming down and too cold a weather to venture out, I played with two images from a recent stop.  The images were taken last week while returning from Pierre to Spearfish.  Because I had to make a stop in Rapid City, I took the cut off on Highway 34 through the little town of Cottonwood.  Not much remains, but its been a few years since I have been by there and the dwindling afternoon light drew me to try and capture a couple of the buildings left in town.  These included the church and the elevators.  Because the original images didn't seem as dramatic as I would like, I thought these would be fun to play with.  Here are the results.

Here are the elevators with a light brown paper texture.  I also used the orton processing technique to slightly blur the image and give it more pop.

Here is a texturized version of the church as well as using a crosshatch brush

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