Flora Oregon

Flora, Oregon, a living ghost town
(c) Darlene Lyon Kruse - All Rights Reserved

This is an older photograph, made on film actually, in the 1990s. But recently I worked on it to create the mood that I had hoped I'd find on that trip to Flora -- but which just didn't happen. Part of being a fine art photographer is expressing a feeling about a place or an event. And the digital darkroom makes it possible for us to create in ways I never managed to do in the traditional wet darkroom.

About Flora. Flora is located in Wallowa County, northeastern Oregon, about 35 miles north of Enterprise, on Oregon Route 3. There are occupied residential buildings in Flora, but mostly it's a ghost town. The area is beautiful, rural, agricultural. Worth spending time exploring with your camera if you've never been there.

About the photograph. This is a composite of two photographs. The sky is one photograph. The buildings and foreground are from another. When I was at Flora, the sky was flat gray. For the feeling I wanted to evoke with this image, I needed a dramatic sky. I pulled this from another image and desaturated it. The buildings are color-corrected (they had a strong blue-ish cast) but otherwise unchanged. the grasses in the middle-ground and foreground have been painted in Photoshop using a brush in Color blend mode. My thanks to my colleague David Lorenz Winston who taught me this technique.

I hope this photograph evokes the sense of isolation and drama I saw in the Flora landscape.