Sunset in the graveyard of the trees

This scene is just down the road from our house. There is a collection of large, dead trees mixed in with live ones. The dead trees look like ethereal hands, reaching for the sky. Sometimes the tree is filled with vultures.

At sunset, if turns into this beautiful image.

Print Size: 17 x 23 inches

Print Price:  $270

Horse over my head # 4

This is the result of playing with a diffusion filter. It gives a very soft look to the picture. The picture of the weathervane over my studio was put into multiple layers in a photo editing program. Then the individual layers were played with. As a last step, they were combined again into a single layer.

The result shows how diffusion can be combined with negative space to produce a fantasy image.

Print Size: 17 x 23 inches

Print Price:  $270

Message from the trees

This was originally a vertical panorama, shot in infrared, with the color shifted towards sepia. It was then cropped, duplicated and flipped to produce a mirror image, then pasted back together to produce the final image.

I added the dark gray border to give the effect of a Chinese scroll.

Print Size: 17 x 30 inches

Print Price:  $350

A bug's world

This bug's eye view of the world takes place on one of the Hobbitt's sunflowers, back when we lived in New York.

There were gaps between the sunflower's petals where you could see other parts of the garden. Very distracting. So I filled in the gaps with petals from other parts of this image. Like most of my retouching, this was done to remove extraneous detail from an image, yielding a simpler image that's more interesting.

Print Size: 42 x 17 inches

Print Price:  $490

Ghost Train

We found this blast from the past on a trip through the Amish country of Pennsylvania. In the town of Strasburg, there's a railroad museum and a functioning train, complete with steam engine that you can take a ride on. If you want, you can even have lunch while riding through the Pennsylvania Dutch countryside. After our ride, while walking through the rail yard, I spotted this switching engine silhouetted against a water tower.

Back at my studio, working on the computer, I created this version, which adds a glow that makes the engine look like something from the past projected into the present.

Print Size: 17 x 23 inches

Print Price:  $270

Broken Shell

Some have questioned why the shells I photograph are broken or imperfect, and some have commented that they have better shells. Perfect shells are easy to find. There are hundreds of shops that sell them, and they aren't very expensive to acquire.

Why the broken shells? I believe that shells are like people. The imperfections add character. Where there is a hole in the shell, you can look into its interior and see another universe. You can see where the creature that inhabited the shell actually lived. And you can see what happened to the shell after its owner abandoned it. (Many of those beautiful shells that you see in the stores had living creatures in them when they were "harvested" to sell to the tourists.)

Print Size: 17 x 23 inches

Print Price:  $270

Birds of the castle

This is at the castle in Manzanares in Spain.

These birds were roosting on a small tree at the side of the castle. There were similar trees on the other sides of the castle as well, and the birds seemed to take turns, moving around to the different trees in some sort of rotation.

This particular tree, with the sun behind it, looked like the best angle. Unfortunately, the birds seemed to be hanging out on the other side of the castle. So I waited, and waited, and waited, for almost an hour, until the birds arrived at this perch.

And this was the reward for my patience. A lone bird caught in flight, lit from behind by the sun

Print Size: 17 x 31 inches

Print Price:  $360

Excissa

This figure looks down on The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Originally part of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

It is now the home of the Exploratorium. Print Size: 17 x 27 inches

Print Price:  $320

Black Bistro

This is a scene in a fashionable bistro, somewhere in lower Manhattan.

Here, the image was reduced to outlined shapes, filled with color. The color was removed and replaced with a black background, while the outlines were turned to white. The result is like a sketch of the original scene.

It's easy to make out the patrons seated at the tables, the waiter on the left of the picture, and the bar in the background.

Print Size: 22 x 17 inches

Print Price:  $260