#grassy area

A Lake, Forest and Mountains in Lassen Volcanic National Park by Mark Stevens Via Flickr: A setting looking to the southeast, offering a vista of Reflection Lake’s shoreline while walking along the namesake trail. I was definitely drawn into the layered composition of this scene. The shoreline had young evergreen trees, with older ones nearby. The lake seemingly shimmered with waves from the afternoon breeze with a forested landscape on the distant shoreline. In the background, Lassen Peak stood high with blue skies all around. I chose to work with HDR Efex Pro 7 to better bring that complete color setting in the image. I later exported a TIFF image to DxO PhotoLab 8 where I did some final adjustments with contrast, saturation and brightness for the final image.

Here Claude Monet’s future wife, Camille Doncieux, sits on an island in the Seine River, looking toward the hamlet of Gloton, next to the town of Bennecourt, from which she and Monet have presumably rowed. This is the only painting to survive from the brief period that the couple spent in Gloton, which the novelist Émile Zola recommended to Monet as a cheap rural retreat that was easily accessible from Paris.

We’re super excited to share this with you all, so let us know what you think! 💬❤️

A road design oddity in Cleveleys. The grassy area is not a roundabout, not a public park, but just a triangle of land surrounded by road, with some bushes and a rubbish bin.

A Meadow with a Backdrop of Trees and Mountains by MarkCStevens https://ift.tt/2YRuavG

One Can Find Love Somewhere from the East to West by Mark Stevens Via Flickr: One Can Find Love Somewhere from the East to West Others find beauty in between the north and south I’m at where the two meet and find only wonder Another work of short poetry or prose to complement the image captured one morning while taking in views at the Wolf Creek Valley Overlook just to the west of the Continental Divide and hence the thought behind my writing. This is in the San Juan National Forest looking to the south. In composing this image, I used an opening between some outcroppings to frame a look beyond to the valley below. I also angled my Nikon SLR camera slightly downward to bring the horizon a little higher into the image, creating more of a sweeping view across this landscape. The rest was metering the image to not blow any of the highlights in the mostly overcast skies that morning, while still being able to pull the more shadowed areas later out in post-production.