A Little January Stroll

Friday was the start of a warming trend here in So Cal, and for someone who grew up in the Snowbelt (or rust belt depending on your frame of mind) anything over freezing in early January is nice. To have 74 at 3PM is an outright treat.

Yesterday I went for another meander in Old Town Monrovia, some to soak in the warm day, a little checking in with some of the merchants and friends to eventually end at Paint N Play Art Studio and Gallery. The latter to help them re-merchandise the gallery after the Holidays. The ladies way of thanking me was to give me an entire wall to build a shrine to me.

The little meander about was too good to be true. The mix of late fall and outdated Holiday decorations with the warm weather was just a bit too unreal. As I walked about and shot I kept in mind I wanted to move out of the literal photo realm and more towards the over colored richly saturated surreal world of a comic book or old time postcard illustration.

To achieve that as always I used Photomatix HDR generation and Tonemapping tools. The final images were given some color correction work with CS2 with their final post processing done with Virtual Photographer. Enjoy my meander from the parking lot to the party room at PnP in that altered state realm of the postcard.