Another scene from the Porter Sculpture Garden in South Dakota where this metal sculpture and others are made by hand from scrap metal by Ron Porter. This is the Piper and the Maiden. And yes I know that’s a saxophone, but the name seemed to fit it.
I did almost all of this using Topaz. I need to get together a review and some tutorials for Topaz. I really enjoy their Restyle Plugin for the variety of options they give you as a creative launching point. This image has a combination of color blend modes, fog, and a camera filter called reflector. A lot of my photos; especially the travel stuff, is very documentary style and for those I don’t want to do any crazy digital retouching because people want to know what the place really looks like. I like to think I’m improving my ability to make interesting images without much editing, and the quality of travel images will improve as I gain experience. For a photo like this, I took it knowing that I wanted to do something unique with it. Yes, this place and these sculptures really exist, and I didn’t re-color them at all. I just added the mood. Since this is part of the series started by the Pandora’s Box image it’s still in that mysterious and ominous space, but this felt like a scene that needed a surreal treatment in an eerily happy way.
Shared by Kay Lynn Gabaldon
“Life, he realized, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery,
in the end there is confirmation, but it’s in the middle
where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile.”
― Nicholas Sparks
