Blue Ridge Parkway Sunset, Day 2

Sunset over the Blue Ridge Mountains

Sunset on the second day up on the Blue Ridge was nice. Not spectacular, but nice. There were no clouds on the horizon to add texture and drama. There was a haze that ... well, hazed over the distance. I was having a hard time during this sunset getting a good exposure for the sky and the foreground. As you can see in this shot, the foreground went dark very quickly. The one little bit of light kissing the nearest ridge does add a hint of the ridge's texture. Again, this was an HDR blend with a little additional post-processing in Lightroom 3 for color and contrast.

All in all it was a good workshop, and I did come away with a few images that I liked.

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Sunbeams

Three Trees

After the close-up session, we waited for sunset at a particular overlook that Richard had decided to use. We were hoping for some clouds to form as the sky was very bare and uninteresting. Some clouds did form over us, but none of them made it to the western horizon for the sunset.

This image is an HDR blend I took as the sun was getting lower in the sky. The "sunbeams" are actually formed by using a very small aperture with the sun in the field of view, in this case f/22. It is also cropped just a little for compositional purposes in order to get the sunbeams coming in from the very top of the frame.

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Colorful Slope

Autumn Mountainside

As the Sun got higher in the sky, it became more difficult to get the "good light". While it was harder to get good, wide-angle landscapes, using a telephoto to zoom in on to isolate small sections seemed to work.

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More Fall Colors

Waterfall and Colors

A waterfall near the Blue Ridge Parkway surrounded by seasonal Autumn colors. These falls are along a popular trail and this is one of the few frames that I got of them without people climbing over the rocks.

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Fall Colors 2010

Colors on the Blue Ridge Parkway, 2010

The weekend after I got back from the North Dakota trip, I went up to the Blue Ridge Parkway with some other members of the Spartanburg Photography Guild. We were attending a photography workshop on that Sunday, but went up the day before for some sightseeing of our own.

To be honest, there was not a lot of color in the mountains at that time. The seasonal colors were limited to particular areas. The photograph above is from one of the better areas of color we found that weekend.

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Red Glow

Red Glow

My son had another fun run event yesterday. This time it was held at Wofford College's soccer stadium here in town. I liked the light on this one tree as we walked past it. There are still some Autumn colors hanging on to the branches.

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Autumn Red

Autumn Red

Here is a small bush that was in it's Autumn colors. I thought it was quite a striking red at the time.

Hope that everyone has a good weekend.

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Autumn Warning

Autumn Warning

Maples. Oaks. These are two of the trees we usually look to giving us the brilliant colors of Autumn. However, other plants are hibernating as well. Ground cover. Herbs. Bushes. Autumn colors can be found in more than just the boughs of stately trees. Take the plant in today's image. Pretty isn't it? It is poison oak ... or poison ivy. I can never remember which is which, just the old saying, "Leaves of three, let it be." While it does have nice Autumn colors, I wouldn't want to pick it for a dinner table's center piece.

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Contrasts

Contrasts

During the Cub Scout Camporee, I was able to take some photographs of the Autumn colors that I liked. This image was captured when all of us parents were relaxing outside of our tents. I happened to look up and noticed the moon clearly visible between two trees. The tree on the right is an evergreen. The tree on the left had turned yellow for the season. I didn't even have to leave my camp chair to get it. I just had to look around to notice something that I had not expected to see.

I call the image contrasts for a couple of reasons. First, it shows the contrasts between evergreen and deciduous trees in Autumn. Second, it shows the Moon out during the middle of the day which contrasts against when we would expect to observed it this clearly. Together the trees and the moon illustrate the contrasts that we do not notice most of the time that are around us throughout the year.

I suppose that might sound a bit artsy, but I actually was thinking along those lines while photographing this scene. There were nearly a dozen frames taken of it with different compositions. This is the one that best captured what I was thinking at the time.

Moral of this story is look around and you could find something unexpected that makes a good image. Try not to look around with blinders. There might be a great image just above you, at your feet, or right behind you.

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Leaf

Autumn Leaf

This is my favorite photograph from the trip up to the mountains. The reason is that I have been trying out a new focusing method. Basically what I have done is reprogrammed the shutter release button to only lock in the exposure when I press it halfway down. By default, the shutter release takes the exposure reading and focuses when you press it halfway down. Then I programed the AF-On button on the back of the camera to preform the focusing function. This lets me focus with the AF-On button and "lock" it simply by releasing the button for static subjects. If the subject is moving, then it continually tracks the subject and tries to keep it in focus.

This particular image was obviously a static subject. However, it is the sharpest image that I've gotten since reprogramming the camera buttons. It is sharp enough that you can see the very tiny veins that run throughout the leaf's membrane. Thus, it proves to me that I'm on the right track with this new focusing method.

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Fall Flowers

Fall Flowers

We usually think of Autumn as the time of year when leaves are falling off the trees as the trees begin to hibernate for the winter. However, there are some plants that flower during this time of year as well. They can make surprising contrasts of color to the typical seasonal palette. I don't know what this purple flowering plant is, but it's light purple hue was a surprise to me. I tried to accent them against the blurred Autumn colors in the background. Kind of a different take on the season, I suppose.

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Colors

Autumn Afternoon

Here is another image from our brief weekend foray up to the Blue Ridge Parkway. I wanted to catch the colors at their "peak", however we seemed to be there a week or two early. That doesn't mean there were no colors. Far from it. There were patches of colors everywhere. The trees just had not gotten to the point where you see an ocean of color stretching across the mountain vistas. This image was one of my attempts to isolate some of the color that was present and place it against the blue sky for some contrast.

Getting out the Vote!

This blog has been nominated in the Best Visual or Photography Blog on the Spartanburg Spark's annual Sparkle City Blogger Awards. I would appreciate it if any of you visitors could spend a moment to vote for this blog. Here is a link to the Spartanburg Spark page. The ballot is on the left margin and the Visual/Photography category is down near the bottom. While you are there I recommend that you visit some of the other blogs as well. There are quite a few local bloggers worthy of RSS feeds. Thanks for the support!

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Brief Trip

Blue Ridge Valley

We went up to the Blue Ridge Parkway this weekend. It was a brief trip for a couple of reasons. First, it was a last minute idea and we got a late start. Second, portions of the parkway were closed south and north of Asheville where we got on the parkway. I had heard there had been an accident south of Asheville where a car had slide off the edge of the road and fell 80 feet down the mountain. We knew about that closure which is why we decided to go north instead. However, that route was closed as well after only two scenic overlooks. The area had gotten some snow the day before and there were patches of ice on the road. It was still a nice afternoon excursion. The colors had not hit their peak yet, maybe in a couple of weeks they will be better.


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Hint of Autumn

Leaves

We had a nice, cool sunny day earlier this week. I took the opportunity to spend some time at a couple of local parks in the late morning / early afternoon. Certainly not the best time, light-wise, to go out with a camera, but it was good to get outside for awhile. I found this fallen branch with leaves on it and thought it was a hint of the forthcoming season. We are pretty busy on the weekends this month. I hope I can get out with the camera when the autumn colors are at their best. Autumn has given me some of my best photographs to date.

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Color Corrected Image

Looking Glass Falls in Autumn 2

It is a slow week this week blog wise. I am still working on the histogram post. I am having trouble getting images of histograms for illustrations. It is difficult to discuss them without a visual reference. Plus, our plans fell through this past weekend. My parents had come up to visit and we planned to go to a local festival. However, it rained all weekend and we decided to stay in. We still had a good visit though, and that is all that really matters.

More after the jump.

One thing that I have been working on is a color corrected version of an image I took last Autumn. The photograph up top is the result of the color correction. The original had a slight blue cast to it that was particularly pronounced in the water itself. The original photograph is shown below for comparison.


Looking Glass Falls in Autumn

I had been wanting to make some prints of this image, but color cast had been getting on my nerves so I hadn't ordered any prints. I spent a few days on and off working on the image to remove the blue cast. At first I tried simple white balance adjustments. However, none of the adjustments made really satisfied me. While they corrected the water, the other colors were affected too much for my liking. Eventually, I used a combination of the HSL color range saturation and lightness adjustments. Those allowed me to target just the blue ranges leaving the other colors alone. Plus, I could use those other color ranges to put a little more pop into the colors that was lost by removing the blue tones globally. I am much more satisfied with the photograph now.

One other adjustment that gave me problems was sharpening. I had originally processed this in Nikon Capture NX 2. However, when I reprocessed it with Lightroom 2 / Photoshop I seemed to loose some fine detail and crispness that I had in the original version. I finally pulled out a couple of my Photoshop CS4 books and tried a couple of other sharpening methods and got results that I was much more pleased with. I'm not sure that the final image has quite as much detail as the Capture NX2 version, but it is so close now that it is hard for me to tell the difference.

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An HDR Comparison

Poinsett Bridge - HDR

As I have mentioned previously, I have started experimenting with HDR photography and thought I would try a comparison between an HDR image and a standard photograph with my typical processing. This weekend my family and I went out along US Highway 11, aka the Cherokee Foothills Scenic Highway. Along the way we stopped at the Poinsett Bridge in Greenville County which is part of the Poinsett Bridge Heritage Preserve. The foothills were in full Autumn colors and we had a great afternoon drive.

More after the jump

While at the Poinsett Bridge I attempted to capture a few series of exposures to process using the open-source Picturenaut HDR software. The photograph above is the best of the attempts. It is seven frames of the same scene taken with the camera on the tripod and changing the shutter speed for each shot. I goofed up the exposure bracketing in the other attempts and didn't get acceptable results when I tried to process them.

I like the above photograph for a couple of reasons. It has a kind of dreamy look to it that is enhanced by the blurriness of the background trees and the foreground water and leaves. I think this happened because of the movement of the water between frames which also moved the leaves, and there was a wind which was moving the upper boughs of the trees. All of that movement combined to cause Picturenaut to average the tonal values on the various exposure together resulting in the blur you can see. I think it actually lends the image a painterly impression.

The quality that I like the best about the image is the lighting on the bridge itself. The highlights are fairly well controlled and the shadows are not too dark. However, even the bridge looks a tad impressionistic to a degree and required additional, selective sharpening to reduce that quality. I also tweaked the contrast and color saturation a tad in Capture NX2 for the entire image.

Pointsett Bridge

This photograph is one that I took "normally". It was hand held and exposed so that there were few if any blown out highlights on the LCD screen. I processed it using Nikon's Capture NX2 RAW processing software. While developing it, I added my normal contrast curve, boosted the colors a bit, and used the high pass filter for sharpening as I do with most of my photographs.

I like this version of the scene as well, but for different reasons. Everything is crisper and more clear in this photograph. It looks more like a photograph, I suppose, than a painting. However, I don't like the lighting on the bridge quite as much as the bright areas are just a bit too bright and bleed out some of the details. The differences in this quality can best be seen by looking at the keystone in the arch. In the HDR version, the keystone is nicely exposed/blended, while in the regular version it has lost some detail due to the bright sunlight.

Both images could certainly be improved with better field techniques and better processing knowledge. However, I think it does give a good look into the differences between HDR and normal processing. I am excited to continue playing around with HDR images. It seems to be an area that could broaden my processing capability.

In the end, both images serve their purposes and that is what it is all about.

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Photo of the Day: Layers of Color

Layers of Color

Another photograph from our recent trip to the mountains. I liked the way the Autumn colored slopes, the clouds coming over the ridge, and the blue sky formed distinct layers of color.

Have a good weekend.

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Mountains and Waterfalls

Looking Glass Falls

Well, it is Autumn and that means it was time to head up into the mountains for the annual color hunt. We went a different route this year. Instead of heading up to Asheville, NC first; we took US Highway 276 up the escarpment toward Brevard, NC. Along the way we stopped at the Bald Rock overlook and Caesar's Head State Park in South Carolina. A big rain system was moving through the area and gave us equal amounts of dramatic clouds, overcast skies and rain until finally clearing out after lunch. Then we went through Pisgah National Forest to the Blue Ridge Parkway. We headed south on the Parkway for a while, but the higher elevations there were heavily clouded so we turned around and head back toward Asheville, NC. We had lunch at the Mount Pisgah Picnic Area on the Park and the front started to clear out afterward. Finally we traveled to Chimney Rock, NC before heading home. The seasonal colors had not yet started at Chimney Rock. Most of the trees there were still green.

The photograph above is from Looking Glass falls in Pisgah National Forest near Brevard. It is easily accessed as it is right along the highway through Pisgah National Forest. A couple more after the jump.


Bald Rock Panorama
This is the first panoramic photograph that I have made by stitching together separate photographs. This particular image was made from three over lapping photographs. I used Microsoft's free Image Compositing Engine software to merge the photographs together. It was very easy to use, and I like the results and that fact that it was free.

The Illuminated Bush
There was a small rainbow at the top of Caesar's Head when we were there. A light cloud was coming over the mountain and into the foothills below where it caught the sunlight and gave us this part of a rainbow. It was almost close enough to touch.

Colorful Blue Ridge Mountains
A shot of the Autumn colors exploding in a valley along the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Lake Lure
This shot was taken from the parking lot of the Chimney Rock Park's Visitor Center. I found it interesting that the trees had not started changing colors here yet while they have already started back home.

There are more photographs from the trip over on the Zenfolio gallery.

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