The second pic is a photo from the iPhone. It just happens to look like one of Andre's watercolours. No idea what I did for it to come out that way.

My watercolors look like that because, until recently, that was what I saw and therefore painted, to be taken in the context of me not being overly set on getting exact colours, and being perfectly happy to simplify scenes that are a bit too chaotic even for "nature". In the last couple of months I had the cataracts replaced with clear lenses in both eyes, and my wife says she's looking forward to seeing what I paint after I get my new eyeglasses in a couple of weeks.

The likelihood, if this is indeed an iPhone effect on your photograph, is that HDR was accidentally switched off. HDR is a facility that shoots three photos every time you press the button once, and averages out the image from all three, thus removing the effect of an electronic "long lens" magnifying the slightest tremble. HDR is a superb convenience and I generally recommend that people keep it switched on.

The fastest way, if you want the effect and don't get it, is to run the raw image from the camera through a Mac app called Graphic Converter, and using only two of it's many impressive facilities, the filter Unsharp Mask, which you use two or three times at low settings (start at 6 pixels and work your way down until you get the right effect), followed by one of the colour filters called Auto Levels which you need to use only once. That's the easy way. It is more difficult in Photoshop.

For a painter, the effect can be achieved with special brushes, called foliage brushes, which have the hairs arranged flat with irregular gaps rather than with an even edge, combined with thickish paint and the artistic technique of dry-brushing. See the winter drees of the trees in the middle of your photo. They'd be a pain to produce with the traditional rigger's brush. Or see the moss dripping in the centre of the painting below. The top half is of the orchard behind the house which was let go about 90 years ago and the bottom half of bristle grass shooting seed, seen beside the river, which runs through town and beside all my normal rides, one day when I had to wait out the rush hour on the main road before continuing my ride. I painted the bottom half first but its background was just a view I'd painted too many times before, so I left it blank. A bit later I was tracking my fox's path from the living room patio around the old stable wall and through the orchard to the gulley with the intention of negotiating with Mrs Fox for a female cub to train up as an inside pet, when it struck me that all these broken trees made just the sort of interesting pattern I wanted as a background.

The sky in your photo is an easy hit for even new painters: float some water on the page where you want the paint to flow, wet only the tip of the brush with thinned watercolor or ink, and put the tip into the wet area, then tilt the paper to flow and graduate the colour much more progressively than you can possibly achieve by trying proactively to paint the gradation. It's so obvious that nobody ever says it, but the watercolorist's best friend is...water.

All that said, Ron, I like your photographs just as they are. If you have interesting subjects from weird and wonderful places -- and, let's face it, Canada is weird and wonderful to about 99 percent of all the people on earth, and so is Japan, and the north coast of Scotland and Hebridean Isles -- you don't need tricky post-processing, you just need to select your viewpoint intelligently and click away.

Hi John ,

Could you please send some photos ?buraksoyer@gmail.com

...and on the matter of bikes amidst The Situation, this appeared recently on the Rene Herse Cycles website:

https://www.renehersecycles.com/bikes-in-the-age-of-tariffs/

Andy, you're in effect saying it is all right for Starmer and Macron and Xi to do onto Americans, but wicked for Trump to do the same onto them.

PH, of course the bikes Trek sells in China have to do with tariffs: Trek set up manufacturing in China specifically to beat Chinese tariffs on imported bikes. And because of Trump's tariffs, Trek will also (wise managers don't make strictly binary choices, they cover all bets) be manufacturing in the States within the year, just like Apple and the chip makers who have already earmarked billions for new factories in the States. You want to imagine the Seasoned Dealmaker's three-dimensional chess against a rigid ideologue who thinks that as Heaven's Son, he can get away with anything, forever. Once you disengage your emotions, see, it is free entertainment, but only if you don't let politics interfere with the giggles.

Dan, I don't have any more time to give to correcting the pablum of the approved narrative of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and anyway, the management must manage as best they can. I'm out of this thread, and won't even read anything further in it, so if you want to fire me out of a cannon for this (rare) clumsiness, do it by message. My excuse is that I thought I was writing on the economics of, inter alia, bikes. I was taking bets with myself on who would be first to mention the consequence to pre-loved bike prices.

Ian, apologies for inadvertently ruining your thread. I shoulda listened when you warned me privately that this would happen.

If I were conducting these interviews, I would ask these bike branders, "How many bikes did you sell in China last year?"

Trek sells loads of bikes in China, it's current difficulties are largely a result of the Chinese Consumer downturn.  I don't know what that has to do with tariffs, those bikes don't pass through the US, so are unaffected. For tariffs to be relevant, the question is whether Trek will start manufacturing in the US, the answer to which is likely to be no.