BY KAREN BOSSICK

Anne Jeffery isn’t the least bit fazed when storm clouds appear in the sky over the sagebrush-covered fields near her home south of Bellevue.

It’s an invitation to grab her Nikon D810 camera and take pictures that might serve as background for one of her digital photo collages.

Jeffery will snap a shot of a blossom against a solid blue sky. Then she’ll remove the sky from the image with the help of her computer. She’ll add an eagle soaring overhead from another photograph. Then she’ll give the whole picture depth by adding a backdrop of clouds, to which she manipulates the color saturation, hue and brightness.

A press of a button and click of the mouse and a dove appears in the left corner of a picture.  Another press and click and a kingfisher pops up on a branch on the right side of the photo.

She can even endow the photograph with a sepia color if she likes.

“I tried doing this before, but the technology was not sophisticated enough to make it work,” said Jeffery. “Before, you had to hand-draw around things with a mouse and hand-paint. It was too hard to make it look good. I can do this in a hundredth of the time—and it’s fun!”

Jeffery is one of a couple Wood River Valley artists who were asked to exhibit their works at the upcoming Sun Valley Arts and Crafts Festival Aug. 11-13. She also will take part in the Artist Studio Tour Aug. 19 and 20.

Jeffery will have her computer set up and be working on a new photomontage so people can get a feel for how she layers one picture on top of another to create the desired effect.

“Most photographers call it a ‘composite.’ I call it a ‘collage,’ ” she said.

The art of photography was pretty straight forward when Jeffery served as an assistant for Ansel Adams at his Yosemite workshops.

Armed with a Kodak Brownie camera, she had taken up photography via a high school correspondence course “Famous Photographers,” while growing up in her hometown of Oakland. She studied at universities in Portland and Berkeley, then went on to study photography at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara.

A public affairs officer for the U.S. Forest Service, she used the technique she had learned to use shooting photographs of wildfires for the Bureau of Interagency Fire Center.

“I always wanted to be an artist but my training focused on technical precision, rather than the creative aspects of photography. The creative part came from me,” she said. “Someone said that if you want to accomplish something, you have to put in 10,000 hours. I think I’m just arriving at my 10,000 hours now.”

Jeffrey’s works have appeared in international exhibitions and in gallery exhibitions throughout the West. Her wildlife and nature photographs have also appeared in such publications as the Sierra Club Wilderness calendar, Eddie Bauer catalogs and New Mexico Magazine.

 “I do a piece in stages, put it away and take it out a week later. I may decide I need a certain bluebird in the picture so then I may have to go out and get that bird. It’s all a beautiful circle.”