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Lens-Artists Challenge #348 – Serenity

*Golf course sunset at Buckeye, AZ.

This week, Egidio hosts the Lens-Artists Challenge with “Serenity.” He writes, “The world is in constant chaos. If not close to our doorstep, we just need to look around. Wars and conflicts seem to be everywhere in one fashion or another. We are left with two options: to let things bog us down or to look for serenity to lift our spirits and calm our minds.” You can read his entire challenge post here.

One of the tools I use to help find potential photos for a Lens-Artists challenge response is Excire Search. It uses an AI model to search keywords and analyze photos to meet a criterion that I define. Often, the program selects a few images, sometimes many. When I used the term “serenity,” Excire generated 250 possibilities, and it might have selected more, but at one time, I’d set the maximum search limit to 250 images.

One of the threads throughout the images Excire Search selected was “water.” Lake, stream, or ocean, almost all of the pictures involved water. To help limit my response to only six, I decided to eliminate all of the photos that didn’t include water. I also eliminated most ocean images as I wanted the water to be still and possibly reflective. So, I open my response with a photo captured by my cell phone during an evening walk in Buckeye, Arizona. As the sun set in the west, the sky to the east exploded with color. The water hazard on the course reflected the blaze of colors in the sky.

Lake Quinsigamond-1
Lake Quinsigamond.

Our son and his wife lived in Worcester, Massachusetts, for a time. We visited them on our first trip to Massachusetts. They lived near Lake Quinsigamond, and the beautiful, clear evening in 2012 prompted me to try night photography with my Nikon D5100, the first DSLR I owned. I didn’t have a tripod, so I rested the camera on a deck railing and set the exposure to six seconds.

Zoolights-1
Pond at the entrance to the Phoenix Zoo.

The Phoenix Zoo features an evening attraction called Zoolights during the Christmas holidays. A bridge across the pond leads to the zoo entrance, and soft lights are mounted in the pond. As sunset neared, we walked across that bridge, and soon the Zoolight festivities would start.

Itasca FC-5
Lake Itasca, Minnesota.

Lake Itasca is the headwaters of the Mississippi River. At the opposite end of the lake from this vantage point, the water draining from the lake will eventually dump into the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans. It was nearing sunset, and the lack of wind made the lake a mirror. I took two images to create a panoramic photo of the lake with Adobe Lightroom Classic.

Mount Rainier in BW-1
View of Mount Rainier from Reflections Lake.

One of the images from my gallery search stood out as it is in black-and-white. This photo was from my Samsung S20U cell phone, converted to black-and-white with Silver Efex 2.

Resort Sunset at Mazatlan
Mazatlan Blue Hour.

Of this half-dozen photos in my response, this is the only ocean view featured in response to Egidio’s challenge. In 2006, we traveled to Mexico on our first of many trips “south of the border down Mexico way,” to quote a line from a Gene Autry song recorded in 1939. I’ll forgive your youth if you have no knowledge of this song of a lost love.

I decided to add two more photos to my response. They are both original morning images, but I converted them to evening photos using AI tools and some artistic license.

Winter-Boler Park
Boler Park in Fargo, North Dakota.

This photo broke my rule of eliminating bodies of water in my response (referencing last week’s “Break the Rules” challenge). On the other hand, deep snow covering the ground could be classed as a body of water in solid form. This photo was one of my first day-to-night conversions. Taken during a cloudy morning, I loaded the image into the first version of Luminar 4 that included a sky replacement tool and experimented with different skies. The tool used artificial intelligence to detect the sky in an image, create a mask, and seamlessly blend a new sky into the scene. One of the skies included with the app was a night sky featuring the Milky Way galaxy. I lowered the image’s exposure one or two stops and then added the night sky.

Cabrillo Coast
Cabrillo Coast.

On a cloudy morning, another cell phone photo from my Samsung S20U was captured near Fort Bragg, California. The original image was taken at 9:28 AM as we drove across a bridge. The bottom of the photo contained part of the bridge guard rail. I used Photoshop’s Generative Fill to remove the guard rail and fill in the bottom 10 percent of the photo. Then I chose a sky replacement in Luminar Neo. Finally, I relit the landscape to match the light from the sky.

Thanks to Egidio for allowing me to think serenely for a change, and for letting me discover that I have so many tranquil photographs in my gallery. I apparently need to take peaceful pictures to compensate for all of the chaos and turmoil in our lives.

Next week, Tina will host the challenge. Be sure to follow her here so you don’t miss her challenge at noon Eastern time on Saturday. Find out more about the Lens-Artists Challenges and how to get started with your responses here. Finally, if you’re interested in the technical specs of the cameras and settings used, you can find details in my Flickr album here.

John Steiner

39 comments

  2. What a stunning gallery of serenity—each image feels like a soft sigh after a long day of human noise. From Buckeye’s blazing reflections to the poetic stillness of Lake Itasca, your water-themed picks are like spa treatments for the eyes. Those creative day-to-night edits—brilliant little acts of visual time travel. Loved every frame.

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  4. Beautiful serenity John! I love that you concentrated on still waters. The mirror images and their colors were amazing. And your editing skills are also amazing.

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  5. Beautiful choices, John.
    Your thought process and editing of these images are also fascinating.
    In the end, each of these photos succeeds in showing serenity.

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  6. I think we’ve all found the presence of water to be a near constant in our search for serenity in our images. You have some beauties here! I love the panorama of Lake Itasca – I think the panoramic format adds to that sense of serenity 🙂 And the B&W of Reflection Lake and Mount Rainier is really super! I envy you that view as the mountain was shrouded in fog the morning that we were there.

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  10. You are so crafty with your day/night images John – great work on those. My favorite of this set is the zoo lights – what a great idea! All beautifully serene images.

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  12. John, water has such a profound impact in serenity. Your images proved that. The opening image surprised me when I read it was a golf course. So beautiful and serene. Excellent post!

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  15. Wow, John. Your reflections are brilliant, I love them all. And kudos for playing with AI too, I think the Boer Park one a more interesting image.

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    • Thanks Sofia. To me, the Boler Park photo isn’t realistic, but it has the appeal of a dreamy sky. You have to ignore the fact that the Milky Way wouldn’t appear in this direction in the middle of winter. After all, it’s art, or so I think, anyway. >grin<

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  18. I love the way you chose to do it John, that is amazing, but really the photos are absolutely stunning. Gorgeous. Water is always a good choice for serenity.

    Reply

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