Documenting My Week--Open to Correction

I am drawn to sky views.  Often on my way to school I have to resist the temptation to pull over into a parking lot or field for a better view of the sky so I can take a photograph.  If I don't have my camera, I can pull out the trusty cell phone.  Sometimes I even try to snap as I drive.

I am fortunate to live in a home with a large arched window that offers almost daily a breathtaking sunset view overlooking Lake Hickory (two blocks away) with Grandfather Mountain and Table Rock in the distance. Anyone looking through my photo archives would find not dozens but hundreds of pictures I've taken from the same spot on my back porch.

Once I took the Saturday photography class with Mike Hessell, I began to take not one but many shots of the same view, changing the lighting to produce different varieties of the same view.  Sometimes I come inside and look out and see the sky has changed so markedly I have to run back out.  Think Etch-a-Sketch on acid.

One principle I learned when I took the Design I art class was that putting several small pictures of the same thing enhances the overall impression.  I have framed sets of sunset pictures. I could cover a wall in hundreds and hundreds of shots, mainly from the same viewpoint (as evidenced below). I decided to try using layers

 even though we aren't getting into them in details until next week. I had taken a picture of our Japanese maple tree, producing more of a silhouette, so I used one sunset shot as background and layered the branches on top, as you see above. 

(Imagine time lapse)  I'm back, and I've managed to do make some adjustments to color on the last (large) photo below. In addition, Alabama Crimson Tide defeated the Virginia Tech Hokies, so all is well.