The Secret Life of Frost

Can you always trust what you see?

I think not. In these days of Photoshop and advanced photography programs that enhance, tweak and transform, many of the images we see have been altered in some way.

I am currently on a journey, attempting to reveal, dare I say, my inner artist. I start my day by perusing countless photography sites exposing me to not only fabulous photographers, but amazing techniques used in post-processing. Textures, grains, and layers...oh my! There are a myriad of options available to the budding photographer when editing one's images. But the question arises, do I really want to change the photo that much?

I recently completed an artistic photography workshop. Fantastic results were rendered by layering and masking an image. The results were phantasmagorical, highly cool, but not to my taste.

This morning as a walked into my garage, I noticed the window was speckled with frost. There I stood, witnessing the morning's gift, frost. I made an about-face, walked back into the house to grab my camera. With camera and macro lens in hand, I clicked away, trying to catch each perfectly unique formation. My favorite was the one above, which I titled, Keeper of the Crystal.

I showed the above image to a friend and he asked, what did I do to the image to make it look this way, and how did I get that nugget in the center? The short answer, nothing. Sure, I tweaked the basic adjustments and added a vignette, but that's it. I could have added a texture or layers, but I chose not to. Why mess with nature?

A sage once said, "If you can't improve on silence, keep quiet".  Allow me to tweak that by saying, if you can't improve upon natural beauty, do nothing. And that is exactly what I did with this image.
Don't thank me for the image. Thank Mother Nature.

​Live in color,
Abby