I’ve been taking bike trail photos ~ and writing the corresponding bike trail articles ~ for this website ~ for about 10 years now. My original photos were actually pretty lame (in retrospect) but since this is something that I really love to do, I kept working at it, upgraded my photo equipment and improved a lot over time (I think anyway).

I have also had photo contributions to this site from other cyclists and photographers, most notably Dale Kiffel who has contributed some very high quality bike trail and nature photos to this website ~ like the (color enhanced) spider web photo ~ from the Des Plaines River Trail ~ on the left.

Like most other photographers these days, I have also used Photoshop and other photo editing programs to enhance the original photos. In the past I had mostly used the photo editing programs for some minor cropping or other very limited changes.

These days I have noticed that quite a few photographers, at various levels, use photo editing programs pretty extensively and many of the most dramatic photos that I see out on the internet look like they have had the colors enhanced.  In some cases it’s just a touch other times it is quite extensive.

Of course, it is best to get everything right in the camera prior to taking the photo and not have to depend on photo editing programs but even when you do get a really good photo you can sometimes make it even better in the lab (as I call it).

Last summer I got my first DSLR camera and have been working on getting much higher quality photos for this website. I believe that I have improved quite a bit and I have found that, in some cases, enhancing the colors on the bike trail and nature photos can improve the photos quite a bit although you still need to start with good photos to begin with.

In the past, I have usually used the color enhancements very conservatively (and I usually mention this with the photo article) just to make the photos stand out a little more and to be a little more interesting.

Recently, I have seen some HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos in addition to some just heavily edited photos out on the Internet that were very striking. So I decided to try this with some of the bike trail and nature photos that I have in my collection and/or have posted out on this website.

So you can find our collection of Intense Color Trails and Nature Photos here.

Most of these photos have been posted previously on this website under the corresponding Bike Trail Pages. The selection that I used includes some of the best and most colorful photos posted in 2011 and 2012.

I’ve used varying degrees of color saturation for this collection of photos. In some cases the saturation is not that high in other cases the enhanced photo looks almost cartoon like (like the second photo on the first photo page).

As I was working on the color enhanced photos it reminded me of that old SNL skit where Christopher Walken kept trying to get MORE COWBELL on the Blue Oyster Cult song. I kept wanting MORE COLOR! (I hope I got better results than they did with the Cowbell on the BOC song though 🙂 ).

So now that I have these Extreme Color photos posted, I’ll check and see how you all like them by the internet traffic to these pages and the “Likes”, “Tweets”, etc. that we get. If I see that these photo pages are popular then I’ll probably some color enhanced collections for the future trail pages that I post.

Note: I have social media buttons at the bottom of each page on this website so if you like these photos please add a “Like” or a “Tweet” etc. at the bottom of the Intense Color Photo Pages.

Thanks, Rob.