Slow Down Enough to See God

Has the beauty of the natural world ever made you feel closer to God? The sun shining through leaves like stained glass. A deer looking you right in the eye. A soul expanding landscape. You imagine what Heaven is like. You feel exhilarated. At peace. You try to savor the moment by snapping a picture…

…But when the picture is developed it doesn’t look a thing like you remembered! It’s flat and boring. The feeling you had when you were actually standing there is lost.

Michelle Stump’s images are what most people wish they could have captured. Her digital art spreads a sense of peace by showing the sacredness of the earth. “God shows us the other side, but not many people slow down enough to see it.”

To show me what she’s talking about, Michelle had me drive five miles per hour down a dirt road in El Rancho past quaint old estate walls, quirky artistic neighborhoods, the perfect view of Black Mesa, and the trickle of the Rio Grande that keeps the rose bushes lush.

“I believe the place calls to you. You can hear or feel a place beckoning.”

I recognized the fence from her picture, Perfect Pasture, where the horses just came up to her while the setting sun warmed the barrancas in the distance. But the place where she took the picture for Cottonwood Arcade was unrecognizable. Someone put in a fence and cut the boughs. “The images are here for an instant, and then they’re gone.”

“Don’t take a picture that’s already been taken.”

Few people can capture the magnitude of the sprawling mesas outside of Los Alamos, but Michelle did in The Rio Grande Rift Valley. Most people take the shot at Anderson Overlook – there’s a place to park your car.

“One morning I took a shot that I don’t think anyone else has taken,” she explained, “from further up the hill.” She then cropped it so there was less sky and more layered cliff. “Cropping really brought the viewer into the picture.”

Stump’s advice for anyone who wants to take better pictures is to learn as much as you can. “You can get really good at Photoshop at a community college photography class,” she said.

To demonstrate her favorite Photoshop techniques, she took a photo of my son, Calvin.

“One thing that makes photographs look more professional is equalizing the lighting,” she said. The equalize feature on Photoshop evenly distributes the brightness values of the pixels. It can be found by selecting Image, Adjustments and Equalize.

In her photo of Calvin, the sunlight behind his head made him look pale. She wanted the viewer to focus on his hand splashing in the water, so she placed points of light where the action was by selecting “Filter,” “Render” and “Lighting Effects.”

Photoshop lets you customize your lighting effects. Michelle adds pink to bring out the flesh tones.
Michelle’s cards and posters are available at the Old Town Card Shop, Papers!, Beeps and www.harpofthespirit.com.


This article was originally published in the July issue of albuquerqueARTS.