@Kay Very flattering, Thanks! And extreme thanks for the repostings. Genuinely means the world.
Took off into the desert to look for a rumoured gargantuan tire dump, the likes of which we had never seen. We remain unenlightened. Instead, we found a tiny deserted scrap heap.
Also, if any of you have tips about expeditiously editing photos of snow (in Photoshop CS5, I'm shooting in RAW) to get the maximum definition out of the snow (fucking iPhoto on my boyfriend's computer has an easier solution than this), I've posted about it in the ASK FOR HELP thread.
I haven't done a lot of editing of snow shots, but I use curves a lot. In masked layers so i could do the snow and the rest separately. In this photo from LA, to negate the contrast-erasing effect of the air quality, I used maybe five different layers of curves, some with very long gradients and some with pencil-sharp edges (the cluster of high rises).
Awe, thanks you guys! :) The editing paid off, I feel, as it was kind of just another bland cityscape until I'd spent about an hour messing with it. It helped that it was a beautiful, clear morning of course. Most of the time I was in LA, you could see the Hollywood sign from Venice (if you had a clear line of vision), it was lovely.
@Mojo - the phoenix piece is on the gate next door to my old place! I lived in the warehouse next door to the scrapyard for most of the 1990s. I still had a darkroom up there until I let the lease go in 2003. It's a yoga studio now. It used to be Newtown's original Commonwealth Bank before they moved the railway station. We had a bank vault in our house, which had its uses. How'd you like Enmore?