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Study of a Agave at the Hungtington Gardens #1

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Agave Plant
(c) John Corney 2008
 This first study of an agave comes from my recent visit to the Huntington Library botanical gardens. You can see the original photo from which I created this and the other two versions in the following posts by scrolling down to the bottom of this post.

In creating this image you'll see that I first of all cropped out a lot of the distracting background so as to focus just on the agave.

I then selected the remaining background and darkened it. I found that the new Quick Selection Tool that comes with Photoshop CS3 worked perfectly in this case since there was a nicely defined border along the edge of the agave; the tool was able to find this edge easily.

I saved off the selection of the agave(Select>Save Selection) in case I needed to work with the selection again and also for what I was going to do in the following images. I wanted to essentially make the remaining pieces of background between the agave "leaves" black, but if I were to just simply fill those areas with black it could look unnatural, so first of all I actually blurred these areas using Lens Blur and then filled them with black and lowered the opacity down to something like 80%. This way these parts of the photo don't just look like they were cut out and blend into the background.

I did some adjustments to levels and layers as I always do, and then I made a copy of the merged layers and in this case changed its blending mode to Luminosity, also adjusting the opacity and fill levels a little. Essentially they are the steps I used in the "digital darkroom" in creating this photo.


Original photo of this agave at the Huntington Library gardensThe original photo of the agave.

Agave Study #2

Agave Study #3
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Samoan Youth

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This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm More photographs from the same Pasifika Festival day can be found in my new post, Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival .
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Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival

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The 15th anniversary Pasifika Festival poster — a collage of the Pacific cultures the festival celebrates. On Saturday 10 March 2007, I spent the day at the Pasifika Festival at Western Springs Park in Auckland. It was the festival's 15th year — an annual celebration of Pacific Island cultures that has been part of Auckland's calendar since 1993, and which typically draws crowds of well over 100,000 across the day. Nine Pacific villages are traditionally represented — Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Niue, Fiji, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Kiribati and Tahiti — with music, dance, food, arts, and craft from each community sharing the same park for the day. I usually visit New Zealand earlier in February, but in 2007 I was there in March and it was the first — and, to date, only — time I've been able to attend Pasifika. I hope to make it back one of these years. But I came away from that single visit with the str...
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The Watchman and Virgin River — Painterly Winter Landscape

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The Watchman and Virgin River, Zion National Park — Painterly Winter Landscape — © John Corney The Watchman is one of Zion National Park's most recognizable formations — the peak that rises up just past the south entrance, often photographed reflected in or framed by the Virgin River as it winds through the valley floor. I photographed this view on the same January 2006 trip as the other winter Zion piece in this collection, with the river running low and the cottonwoods and willows along the bank stripped bare for the season. I worked this one up with AI assistance into a full painterly interpretation, the same way I've approached the rest of this Zion series — directing the process the way a film director works with a cinematographer, choosing what to carry forward from the original photograph and what to push harder. Here that meant leaning into the warmth of the low winter light against the cool snow on the upper ridgeline, and letting th...
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