One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt. — Georgia O’Keeffe

There were no clouds there when we crawled into our tents to go to sleep. And no clouds throughout the starry night when I peaked out the flap of the tent. But sure enough in the morning there were clouds, banked all the way from the gorgeous Goat Rocks Wilderness, where we were backpacking, to Mt. Adams in the distance.

Much distance in light values, too, from the dark foreground to the sunlit background. I’ve been following some debate on the internet about the value of HDR (see here, for instance, at Scott Bourne’s photofocus blog). And it’s true– there’s some really bad, hypersaturated, noisy HDR out there. Much of it seems to aim at the look of a video game image. Which is fine if you like that kind of thing. I’m more interested in honoring the world as I see it. And rendering this scene as I saw it would have been nigh impossible without HDR.

I found this hyper-embellished wall in Siena, Italy, one day, just strolling with my camera. I love the triangles drawn on the wall on the right, the red filigree banner of  mythological animals (griffins? chimera?), and the richly colored roof tiles.

“I want to know one thing,” said Picasso. “What is color?”

Wonder into wonder existence opens. — Lao Tzo

Colors are brighter when the mind is open.– Adriana Alarcon

For me, this photograph evokes all the lure of faraway places — the startling blue sky, the bright orange wall, and right at the edge of town, a cloud-capped volcano. Antigua was founded by the Spanish in the 1500s, and served as the colonial capital for almost 200 years, until a spate of earthquakes caused the government to move the capital to Guatemala City. Packed with Spanish Baroque buildings and ruins, it is a designated UNESCO World Heritage site.

“The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.” — William Least Heat Moon

There was a Renaissance chapel I was heading to on this road, just down the hill from the village of Cortona. And then the sun, just before it sank beneath the horizon, ignited this leafy view of terraces and cypress trees and yellowy shrubs, and it gave me such pause that I never made it to the church.

Says Martin Buber, “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”

I am always hoping to make a discovery here, to express the feelings of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors, their minglings and their oppositions, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones.

–Vincent van Gogh

I hate these photo locations where you almost have to wait in line to get your shot. Christine Falls is perhaps one of the emost photographed waterfalls in the Pacific Northwest, due in part to the beautiful stone bridge above it, and the fact that it’s in a national park. But I thought it was worth my while to bump shoulders with other photographers for this shot. I focused strictly on the falls themselves, cropping out the bridge.

Using HDR technique created the little spotlights of falling water in the lower right corner, and enriched the brown of the rock in that corner, too. I like the way the reddish-brown rocks complement the blue-green water in the plunge pool.

Waking in the pre-dawn dark after a night of sleeping on Mary’s Peak, the highest mountain in the Coast Range, I followed a trail to a clearing, where I set up my tripod, attached the camera to it, then sat down and waited for the scene to reveal itself. The mountain on the horizon is Mt. Jefferson. The Willamette River, though you can’t see it in the photo, runs right to left through the middle distance, to meet the Columbia at Portland. The silvery clouds come from the Pacific. Perfect silence, except for the little voice in my head saying, “I want coffee. A latte. With big heaps of foam….”

And then the sky turned marmalade.

Click.