Buckeye, Arizona.

On March 18, 2013, I was sitting right where I am now, in front of my computer where I pushed the Publish… button in WordPress for the first time. That button push launched Journeys With Johnbo onto the InterWeb. I am writing this at the same desk at our home here in Buckeye contemplating a couple of more local trips before we head north back to our home in Fargo. By now, you might be asking, “What’s up with the weird half monochrome – half color photograph.” The purpose of that photo will become clear a little further on down the page.

OK, so the thousands of followers that I dreamed about having those first days didn’t happen. That’s OK. Since it’s inception, Journeys has a following of 725 members. In addition, I’ve attracted much smaller followings on Twitter and Facebook. I enjoy sharing my travels and photos with all of you. In that time, stats indicate over 70,000 views of the 695 blog posts I’ve written. Still one of my favorite stats to review is the Countries map indicating where the daily visits originate. I was genuinely surprised at the number of visitors to Journeys from around the world.

Now, about that weird opening photo. On March 1, my entry in the weekly photo challenge included the photo above. I got a larger than normal number of comments from people. A couple of readers expressed interest in seeing the color version of the image. In reply to those comments, I promised to post the color version. For those who wondered what the original looked like, here it is.

This image was minimally processed in Lightroom in December, 2012. Probably the biggest difference in the two images is the sky. The photo challenge topic was ‘Out of this World.’ I loaded the image into Silver Efex Pro, a tool designed to convert color to black and white. I used one of the application’s filter options to darken the blue in the sky. That caused the very thin clouds to stand out against the dark background creating that other-worldly sky. I also increased a control called ‘structure’ in the tool which enhances the details in fine objects like the myriad of plants in the foreground.

In 2012, I barely knew how to use the tools to bring out details or otherwise improve upon the basic image captured by the sensor in the camera. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about photo enhancement. Some might consider such manipulation to be “sacrilegious”. To those I would remind you that I am not a photojournalist where all but the most minimal editing is forbidden. Secondly, all images as they come out of the camera, especially those the camera has converted to jpeg format, are simply the camera designer’s interpretation of the raw data that is generated by  the sensor. I took the opportunity in the image above to share a reworked color version of the image. The photo above was recently processed in a new tool I’ve been using to process my images called Luminar 2018 with basic processing still being managed by Adobe Lightroom.

All in all, I enjoy reading and responding to your comments about my posts. A special thanks to Michael Lai and G P Cox, both were there liking my first post and both still commenting occasionally on my latest posts. Thanks also to my son, Josh, who’s own blog was an impetus to my making the decision to start Journeys. Josh always has something to note and leads by far in the list of top commenters.

For your convenience, I’ve placed the images in a gallery. In most browsers, you can click on an image to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.

Original from Dec. 2012.

Rework in 2018 with Luminar and Lightroom.

Rework with Silver Efex 2.

Split of color and monochrome created in Photoshop Elements 14.

We’ll see you again on Travel Tuesday with the latest featured trip, a visit to Albuquerque’s Museum of Nuclear Science and History.

John Steiner