Before and After: Two Joshua Tree Photographs, Two Painterly Reworkings

I want to try something a little different in this post — a working walk-through of how two of my Joshua Tree photographs from April of 2011 became two of my newest painterly artworks on Redbubble. Same compositions, same landscape, same afternoon in the Mojave. Very different final pieces.

The Raw Photographs

Both photographs were taken on a single afternoon trip to Joshua Tree National Park, shot in Canon raw (.CR2) format on my Canon EOS. Raw files are, as any photographer knows, deliberately flat — they carry the maximum amount of information the sensor recorded, without any of the punchy contrast, saturation, or sharpening that a JPEG would apply automatically in-camera. That flatness is a feature: it gives the photographer the widest possible latitude to make choices in post-processing. But it also means a raw file, straight out of the camera, doesn't look like the scene the eye remembers. It looks like the scene the sensor saw, drained of atmosphere.

Here are the two raw captures, converted to standard image files with no processing beyond the raw conversion itself.

The original photograph — Joshua Tree granite formation, midday.

The original photograph — dead juniper among the boulders.

These are considered photographs — clean composition, careful framing, and in the case of the juniper piece the twisted dark form of the tree does real graphic work against the pale rock, with the yucca serving as a right-side counterweight and the mountains anchoring the horizon behind. But looking at them next to the actual experience of standing in that landscape, something is still missing. The Mojave doesn't feel flat and even. It feels like heat, and geological time, and colour. That's what I wanted the final pieces to hold on to.

The Painterly Reworkings

Rather than process the raw files in the usual photographic direction — bumping contrast, warming the whites, deepening the shadows toward a polished landscape photograph — I decided to take these two in a different direction entirely. I wanted painterly renderings: pieces that would sit closer to the tradition of American desert painting than to the tradition of desert photography. Thicker in texture. Warmer in hour. Heavier in atmosphere.

Here are the two artworks that resulted, both now available on Redbubble.

Joshua Trees and Granite Boulders at Sunset — © John Corney 2026

Joshua Tree Desert at Golden Hour — © John Corney 2026

What Changed and Why

The compositions are almost exactly the same as the source photographs — same boulder, same juniper, same yucca, same mountains in the distance. What changed is everything to do with atmosphere: the time of day shifted from noon to a low golden hour, the sky deepened from a friendly midday blue to a richer teal filled with towering sunset-lit cumulus, the rocks picked up the warm apricot glow that granite catches in late light, and the whole surface was worked in thick impasto brushwork rather than the smooth continuous tones of a photograph.

Neither version is more "true" than the other, exactly. The original photographs are true to the sensor. The painterly versions are truer to how the desert feels — the heat radiating off the rock, the way the light in Joshua Tree is heavier and more particular than the light anywhere else in California. Both are legitimate, and both belong on someone's wall for different reasons. But the painterly versions are the ones I've come back to, and the ones I've decided to sell as prints.

A Note on Process

These painterly reworkings were made with the assistance of ChatGPT, an AI image tool, working from my original photographs and my art direction. This is the same collaborative process I've been using for several of my recent digital works: I was there in the desert, I made the photographs, and I then directed the painterly rendering through a series of careful prompts specifying palette, hour, brushwork, and atmosphere. ChatGPT is the medium; the eye and the intent are mine.

I think of it the way a film director thinks of working with a cinematographer. I knew exactly what I wanted the final pieces to feel like. AI, in this case, is the collaborator that could render what I had in mind. If that framing is new to you and you'd like to think about it a bit, that's fair — many working artists are still finding the right relationship with these tools. My own position is that when the photograph is genuinely mine and the artistic direction is genuinely mine, using AI to render the finished style is one legitimate way of making a piece, alongside every other. Full transparency on how the work is made feels like the right way to invite people into that conversation.

Available as Prints on Redbubble

Both painterly pieces are available at my Redbubble shop across the full product range — canvas prints, framed art prints, posters, throw pillows, and more. The impasto texture reads particularly well as a large canvas, where the "brushwork" gets room to breathe.

Joshua Tree Desert at Golden Hour Joshua Trees and Granite Boulders at Sunset

The two are companions to each other and would hang beautifully as a pair — both taken on the same afternoon, both rendered in the same painterly hour, both parts of the same Mojave story.

You can find all my work at my Redbubble shop, KornKob Art — or search Redbubble for kornkobart (one word).