This week, Egidio shares his first challenge as a team member. With this theme, he is sure to get a warm welcome. He writes, “For this week’s challenge, I invite you to look at your photos or capture new images showing how warm colors appear in your world and their emotional significance to you. Hopefully, the images I share here will spark your imagination. Tell us how your images made you feel when you captured them. You can concentrate on a single color or show a variety of colors, but please make warm colors the main focus.” You can read his entire challenge post here.

As I reviewed my gallery of edited photos, one image stood out having many memories of good times. For a little over a decade, we owned a home in Buckeye, Arizona, and traveled there every winter. We decided to purchase a used convertible so we could have a vehicle more in tune with the Arizona vibes. A friend put his 2004 Mustang convertible up for sale on Facebook and I was quick to take it off his hands. That year we drove it to Arizona and it stayed there until we sold it when we decided to sell our house there. In this image, we were going to explore the nearby desert and I stopped for gas just as the sun came up. A Cell phone picture captured the moment.

On a journey home from the Grand Tetons, we found a road less traveled, again to avoid the Interstate. We didn’t expect the beauty we found driving through Wyoming’s Wind River Country. Just one of the autumn sights was this beautiful stand of trees showing off their fall colors.

A stand of orange and yellow flowers attracted my attention at the Denver Botanical Garden in Colorado. For one exercise in photo editing, I cropped the image and ran it through a couple of Photoshop filters. The goal in this case was to create an impressionistic view of the garden scene.

The next three shots are all edited to focus on the warm colors. Each of the next three images was edited in Lightroom Classis to emphasize the warm colors in the image. The sunflower field in eastern North Dakota was mature and ready for harvest. I did very little to enhance the bright, warm colors in the late afternoon. Instead, I used the HSL color sliders to back off the greens in the image leaving the leaves of the plants almost in black-and-white. Removing or dampening unwanted colors gives the desired colors emphasis without making them oversaturated or garish.

In our Arizona backyard, I planted an orange tree when we moved in. The crops were variable from the tree over the years, but in one particularly fruitful year, I captured this cluster of oranges. Using the HSL sliders in Lightroom Classic, again I reduced all of the cooler colors to almost black-and-white leaving the orange subjects standing out.

Another plant in our Arizona backyard that brought color every year was an Orange Jubilee plant. I used the HSL slider to de-emphasize the cooler colors, in this case, to create a completely black-and-white background. If you have Lightroom Classic and you are looking for the HSL sliders, they were moved in version 13 of Lightroom Classic to the Mixer tab of the Color Mixer panel.

In 2006, we made our first trip to Mexico where our son and his bride tied the knot. We stayed for a few days at Mazatlán and would make several trips there in the winter over the next few years. It was in 2006 we were on the beach during the golden hour. As the sun sank behind Bird Island (Isla de Pájaros), the sky took on an extra warm tone resulting in one of my favorite images of Mexico.

Welcome aboard, Egitio! Yours is a great introductory challenge. I look forward to your take on upcoming challenges. Next week it’s Anne’s turn to challenge us. If you’d like to join the challenge, Check Egidio’s page here for tips on joining in the fun.