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Every craftsman, artist and artisan has a few tools of their trade. They could be cameras, brushes and paint, hammers and saws or even knives and frying pans.

In this picture, the tools are gardener’s tools. What else is there to say?
They are well used. And, that’s the mark of someone who cares.

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I found this tattered American flag stapled to a piece of boundary marker in far, far northern Albu – querque where the building of new homes must come to an end because the ever-expanding city runs into Indian land. I’m beginning to think that all of the pueblos and the land surrounding them, which is always Indian land, is a great thing. It stops the never ending growth of the city within very definable borders. By the way, that fence in about the middle of the picture is not a border fence. It is a dust break.

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Summer Flowers. Pretty things that brighten up a parched high desert landscape. I did a little post production fine tuning. One of the plug-ins that I use is called OnOne. It’s essentially a group of actions written to enhance pictures. Many of the actions are intended for use in the wedding and portrait side of the business. But, I found one called summer. In the notes field the author said this plug in was written to bring out the pop and brightness of late summer. I don’t know about you, but to my eye when late summer arrives, flowers, trees, lawns and bushes start looking a bit wilted and faded. Everything seems ready for Autumn.

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Then it is time for the Lavender Festival in Los Ranchos, New Mexico. The festival has grown from a few booths and a tour of one farm to a massive area along the banks of The Rio Grande.

The best, and my favorite, place to visit Los Pablonos Farm where you can do everything from cut your own Lavender to learn to knit to make honey to buy fresh vegetables.
It’s best to go early. Not so much because you’ll have a better selection, but it gets hot out there. Real hot. However, Northern New Mexico is the midst of a La Nina system which is making the temperatures cooler and the humidity higher. Well… that’s relative. Humidity is at about 30 percent. In Louisiana humidity is probably around 80 percent today.

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It seems with the unseasonal heat, that the dog days of summer have arrived when summer is just a puppy.

So, I’ve been playing around in addition to marketing myself for more assignments and commissions.
This is another view of the moonlit Sandias. In this case, I sharpened the detail a couple of times and then used the watercolor brush in Photoshop to make a “painting.”
Photographers are painters in a hurry. Indeed.

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A friend and colleague from the gallery emailed to say that her brother-in-law had just passed after a long battle with cancer. Her husband is devastated even though he knew this was coming.

I made this picture at the chapel at St. Roch in New Orleans. The chapel, like the church at Chimayo, New Mexico is supposed to be a “Lourdes of the United States.” If you pray for a miracle while you are there, it will happen. I believe miracles take hard work. I also believe that the work is the prayer.
I’ll work as hard as I can today on the projects that I’m supposed to do as a prayer to my colleague and her husband. The miracle isn’t for her brother-in-law. he’s at peace. The miracle is for my colleague and her husband. I hope for them, that the pain passes quickly and the healing begins immediately.

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Sometimes I just “find” images in my files. No, my filing system isn’t haphazard. But, sometimes I just don’t think much of an image while I’m editing. But, I review past work because time and distance is a great lens through which to evaluate work. Of course, it works both ways. Pictures that I once thought were pretty good sometimes fall into the heading of “I shot that piece of… what was I thinking?” But, not in this case.

A old friend of mine used to say that photographers are painters in a hurry. So, I thought, “why not?” I used a plug-in called Day for Night and painted the image up a bit and the resulting image looks like an impressionistic water color.

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Today is the first day of summer and the longest day of the year. The Summer Solstice. Summer in New Mexico means music in many of the town’s and cities’ plazas. Old Town Albuquerque is no exception. Typically, there are mariachis playing in the evenings, on the weekends and on special events. In this image we see a straw hatted musician looking at his musical notes. Yeah, yeah. It’s a little too abstract to actually see what he is doing. We’ll get to that on a later post.