December 9, 2008 - Goofing around

After spending the afternoon volunteering at the DNR library I squirted and sklurched back home in our sloppy snow. The four+ inches we got last night were in process of being plowed as I tried to find a warm and fuzzy route to the DNR this morning, at times wondering if I was going to make it to the top of some of the hills in St. Paul with slush spraying out of every fender-well.

Not quite so bad on the way home, but when I got through the door Happy was hopping up and down with his legs crossed after being in the house all day, so I herded him outside for a walk to the Longfellow "Gardens" and to the lagoon.

The snow was still pretty unbroken up there except for the tracks of one lone XC skier, and the weeds and flowers that went to seed in the last couple months are still standing with little white beards. 

It was getting dark and I was trying to shoot on-camera flash and accentuate the textures, but when I got home it wasn't working for me.

So I started playing with Paint Shop's "Color Replacer", which in this case is a gray scale replacer. I found that if I picked a near white value from the sky and replaced that over the entire image with white, I would get this sort of reticulated, white highlight that made the image much more "graphic" for lack of a better term.
All three of these images have it to varying degrees. Some of the shadows sort of "flip over" and become white, while the rest of the image stays in it's normal ranges. Kinda fun. Definitely worth some more exploration and tweaking.