Catino Creations: The Calm Before

The other day, just before evening fell, there were these gorgeous puffy white cumulus clouds in the sky. I know they were because I Googled it. I have been waiting for one of these blue sky, sunshine, puffy white cloud days so I could head over to a nearby hill and take some pictures. That is what I did. Proof:

This is the kind of puffy white clouds in the sunshine over a hill kind of day where you expect to see the Von Trapp kids come out with Julia what's her name singing about the hills being alive with the sound of music whilst wearing outfits fit to make curtains with.

And as usual, I had an outcome in mind as to what I wanted to do with the photos I took. The sun wasn't involved. So, picture with no sun involved was the focus.

Since I knew that I would be messing around with the photos to create some sort of artwork master pieces, I wasn't too concerned with the exposures and depth of field. But I did want some focus. Sort of.

I chose a picture and added a layer which I got, if memory serves me correctly (and it usually does not), at one point from here

http://shadowhousecreations.blogspot.com/

and looks like this:

Then I combined the two dropping the texture to about 50 % opacity.

From here I upped the contrast and dropped the brightness. This will bring out the texture and later I went in and made the whole thing brighter.

I did make the whole thing brighter and then decided to change the hue and saturation a bit before burning in some dark edges. This is my final example: