Claret Cup Cactus Flower (Utah)

Claret Cup, May 12, 2005
Okay, I know that claret cup cactus flowers don't exactly fit my theme "woodland spring," but at least this is a spring-blooming wildflower! I found this claret cup blossom in a dry desert-like area not far from Boulder, Utah. I spent ten days in that area back in May to attend a Rod Planck Photography tour. In addition to the tour, a couple friends and I stayed on for a few more days and did additional photography on our own. We photographed a lot of wildflowers, canyons, sunsets, sunrises and lots of other things. I addition to doing photography, we found a really nice coffee-shop-book-shop in Boulder.
I have dramatically cut the rate at which I post images during the past week because I have been SOOOO busy trying to learn more about working with digital images. I have mentioned some of this stuff already, in previous posts. I do plan to get back to my spring woodland wildflower photos soon. One step at a time. Meanwhile, I have decided to post miscelaneous other images just for fun.
Until I start working with SCANNED SLIDES, you can pretty much assume that each image starts as a Nikon NEF (raw format) from my Nikon D-70. Once the image file is on my hard drive, I open the file with Nikon Capture Editor software and adjust the contrast and color balance, if necessary. It seems that every image needs to have its contrast increased just a little to avoid having the lighter areas appear too dark and drab. Sometimes I adjust the color balance just a little for the purpose of trying to get the colors to better represent the original color of the subject. And that's about it. If there is a dust spot showing on the image, then I open the image in photoshop and try to fix it there. The final step in preparing to post the photo on the website is to set the resolution at 72 ppi and save the image in JPEG format. By using 72 ppi, the image stays clear and crisp for viewing on a monitor, and file size becomes small enough that it can download in a reasonable amount of time.