Snow fell in mid-February 2026. It blanketed our back yard and its boulders.

The original photo version, below, barely shows what grabbed my eye.

From my vantage-point there was a line of boulders whose upward climb followed a diagonal line from lower left to upper right. I found that PATTERN COMPELLING!

I love the posted version of this photo (above).

But my process is worth learning about. So, I will show you a series of versions, each addressing a problem or reaching for more beauty.

The graphic above points to some of the less attractive features of the photo.

Note that even at this stage I have a final version in mind! I describe my vision in the first blocks in this post.

I wanted some rock surface from which snow had melted to remain, for realism. But the black color in the upper right hand corner was too much. I marked it for deletion.

Not removing the black surface here, I did brighten it and its surroundings to make it obvious.

I also included the editing tool I used to transform the upper right hand corner of the image—""New Generative Remove Spot." That tool copied some of the surrounding snow and made that a model for filling in the black.

With the black corner taken care of, you can begin to see the final image-edit. The version above shows you where in the original my crop lines were.

Lightroom has a feature-set it calls masks. The part of the image I am preparing to hide is in red, showing what the mask will cover. Masks allow me to make changes to PART of an image.

As you see in the right column, Mask 1 consists of two "linear gradients." They occupy the upper left and lower right corners of the image. After selecting two parts of the image I was able to darken JUST those.

This sort of "mask-as-crop" allowed me to capture the diagonal pattern of boulders that caught my eye. In the two final versions, below, you will see the power of those masks.

The masking I described let me render the "climbing" series of boulders as I saw it in my creative eye— following a diagonal line. In Lightroom, I could not have done this with plain cropping.

Liquid water and ice can appear blue. This snow did not. I added a blue tint as a fine-art photographer. It fits my aesthetic sense.

This reflective post pulls back the curtain on my process, my post-processing (the processing I carry out after the shooting process.)I hope you see yourself in this post. I am not a world-class professional whom average people could never be. I am learning! I hope you have learned some things by following my process.

You can learn even more by visiting my Photography Techniques page.

Yes, it snows in Northern Arizona! You can read about a snowstorm here in Flagstaff in this blog post, a newsletter called Arizona Snowscape

Blue ice? Check out the glaciers in my Alaska's Inside Passage gallery.

My Shapes and Patterns gallery celebrates "nature's geometry."

"Northern Arizona" is the gallery that puts snow, boulders, and landscapes together.