We should get this out of the way right from the top:
The third picture today is one of my favorites ever!
I just wanted to warn you. You don't have to like it as much as me. And I may have hamstrung it by putting it not only in a large group of pictures, but by putting it in a group of similar pictures as well. And then setting expectations too high on top of that!
One thing that has been challenging to me in this wave of photoshop pictures is that a lot of the best ones I make fall under the "less is more" category. I usually gravitate towards a "more is more" approach. Just look at me write! Do you think this sentence is necessary? No, it's just delightful frills, baroque ornamentation. It's all a theatrical gesture! If you were to look over these last few days of pictures the ones that have real gravity, and often a simplicity to them, are often ones that had previous versions chock full of stuff; nuns, lions, alien towers, whatever, that I've had to go into and remove all the things I so painstakingly added to start with. This challenged me. But though I sometimes don't mind a real photoshoppy quality to my pictures if I'm telling a story, I don't like it when it's happening by accident. So out go the lions, and the towers, and the flying saucer, and at least half the nuns.
The first picture below has some added art characters, though it might be better without it. Sometimes I lose that battle for spareness, sometimes I win. It did have a wolf in the picture that I got rid of. I left the moose in, partly because it's hard to pick out visually anyway, so it's almost a surprise. Looking through these pictures below, I left one or two elements in almost all of them that I could arguably have gotten rid of. Only the fifth one, with the crashed ship on the trail, is stripped down all the way. I had a fox in it, but it didn't look right.
The third one has just three elements, all perfect. Most of that's luck, but you make your own luck, which is a way of saying if something is going to work out great one out of a hundred times, all one has to do is to do it a hundred times and something is probably going to work out.
But I guess you knew that.
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