We took this trip probably some time in 1986 in our LeSharo motorhome (see below). At the time we lived near Chicago, Illinois and this trip traveled to Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming), Devil’s Tower National Monument (Wyoming), Badlands National Park (South Dakota), Mount Rushmore National Memorial (South Dakota), Custer State Park (South Dakota), and Pipestone National Monument (Minnesota).

What is abstraction in photography? Abstract photography to some people is a photograph of something you cannot recognize, but that is not true of most of mine and not my goal. My goal is usually to simplify the image in order to extract the “essence” of it and downplay the too-busy details. Some of these images were abstract out of the camera, but for most of them I used tools in Photoshop and Photoshop plugins to achieve my goals.

We toured Topkapi Palace on our 2013 visit to Istanbul. Since it was very crowded and I did not feel like standing in line to go into a museum, I stayed outside and photographed whatever I found. Part of what I found was very interesting trees, especially their bark.

I will start with the famous hollow tree. I read that a fungus attacked but not kill some of the trees, and some became hollow. (I think the black interior of the hollow tree was applied by man, not nature.)