Life After Leaf: An Artistic Celebration of Yellowstone’s Dead Trees

Are you looking to buy a unique Christmas gift for friends or family? Consider my newly published art book: Life After Leaf.

In October 2021 I traveled to Yellowstone National Park twice for the purpose of shooting images of the trees. All the images in my book were shot along high altitude hiking trails

Over the years, I have developed Photoshop artistry techniques for digitally blending my images of trees with texture images of rocks, clouds, water and many other natural objects and vignettes that I captured this year. In total, my book draws upon my collection of more than 2,000 images of trees and textures. I use Photoshop to blend the tree and texture layers. I then use additional Photoshop tools such as adjustment layers, masking, gradients, blurring, and lighting techniques to wrestle these abstract images into final form. These techniques often involve considerable trial-and-error and the end product often consists of dozens of PS layers. While working on these images, they sometimes take on a life of their own.

Life After Leaf contains 72 photos taken at Yellowstone National Park along with more than 160 works of art featuring Yellowstone’s dead trees.  The price is $45 and shipping is free. I invite you to order your copy at my Digicrylics website.

Or feel free to browse my other artwork at my two art websites, Digicrylics.com and Erichvieth.com.

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The “Small” Things of the Past

I was minding my own business yesterday when a Swedish book publishing company asked whether it could use one of my photos (that it found on Flickr) on the cover of a new book. It's a photo I took at the Grand Canyon in 2014. The day I took this photo seems so long ago now. I have had a few other requests like this. I'm happy to make my photos available for small projects without payment, asking only for attribution. This delightful request reminded me an important principle: There is often a long time lag between the things we do and the moments where those little things gain greater meaning. Almost everything difficult that I do today would have been impossible without years or decades of cultivating friendships, work-relationships, skill-sets and hard-earned experience. That's because "compounding" is at play far outside of the financial realm. Compounding is one of the most important and least appreciated principles in our lives. Many of my recent happy occurrences are built off off dozens or hundreds of little things, many of them far in the past. It's not easy to see where the things we do today will lead. It might be worth our time to celebrate all the moments in our lives, including the small moments.

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Greed for Ever More Knowledge and Experience

Two days ago I returned from hiking/photographing Yellowstone National Park for a week. Being in such an immense beautiful place, I was able to turn my mind off of the many things I do or attempt to do in my normal life. Hiking in Yellowstone, I merely walked about, noticing  beautiful things and trying to take photos that hit the sweet spot, a task that is largely intuitive. I looked for images that would work as pretty photos or as works of art (I blend some of my photos with numerous texture and blending layers on Photoshop). As I hike and take photos, I tend to think of only those few things and I tend to not think much in words, which is a wonderful change of pace from my normal life. Somehow I don't think of much other than what is in front of me and it calms my ADD-ish monkey mind).

Now that I am back home, I am tempted to think in many directions at one time, whether it be processing the photos, reminiscing about the trip, planning another trip someday, reaching out to treasured friends, working as an attorney, trying to understand the culture wars, writing an article (or two or three), working out, walking in the nearby park, playing or composing music and many other things/distractions/opportunities.  I am lucky to live a life where these things are realities.  But what should I do when there are so many things I want to think about and do?  I am in my mid-60s, which lends a bit of urgency to this quest, because I don't know how many more active years I will have, physically and mentally. This quandary/opportunity reminds me of the following quote by Frederick Nietzsche (aphorism #249 from The Gay Science):

Oh, my greed! There is no selfishness in my soul but only an all-coveting self that would like to appropriate many individuals as so many additional pairs of eyes and hands—a self that would like to bring back the whole past, too, and that will not lose anything that it could possibly possess. Oh, my greed is a flame! Oh, that I might be reborn in a hundred beings!” --Whoever does not know this sigh from firsthand experience does not know the passion of the search for knowledge.

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