One of my favorite adventures with the Lord is early morning watching Him paint the desert sunrise. Every morning is a new experience. And when clouds fill the sky, there is the promise of a beautiful glow casting shades of orange, red, and yellow across the desert floor.
On this particular morning, the shimmering light was especially stunning so I spent at least an hour capturing dozens of images with my Nikon D810 camera. I selected my Nikkor 24-120mm telephoto lens and then zoomed in close to capture the silhouette of desert plants against the sky. It was an inspiring space in time — one of those special events I always cherish alone with the Lord out in His creation.
Back home, as I scanned through the images in Adobe Lightroom, I discovered this particularly luminous photo taken at 75mm with my telephoto lens. I have discovered over many photo shoots and the experience of taking thousands of images, that the compositions of images zoomed in are usually cleaner in terms of distractions.
So this sunrise landscape was the ticket. I decided to transform the capture into a photo artistry image about Jesus giving us light and life. I have been living in the gospel of John these days and I notice again and again how the Lord is the One who gives us light.
While processing in Adobe Camera Raw I decided not to boost the highlights as I usually do because I wanted those desert plants to remain as a silhouette. That's the way I saw them out there in the field. Then I added a RadLab filter to give a bit of an antique tone. I added texture and a vignette with ON1 Software. I used a layer mask to paint out the texture and vignette from the areas of the text.
For the text, I decided to highlight "Jesus" and used a Monet font, a bit over the top blending with the clouds but quite dramatic. All the other text is Helvetica Neue.
The verse I chose is John 1:4, "The Word gave life to everything that was created, and His life brought light to everyone." What a powerful truth to know that Jesus is the One who gives light and life to each one of us, especially during this time of year when we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Jesus truly is "the reason for the season!"
If you need light to guide your way and want to experience life as it is truly meant to be, run to Jesus, dear friend. He is the source of real light and life.
Lord, thank You for giving us light and life. We love You and celebrate You today. In Jesus' name, Amen.
Blessings ♡ Grace
