Glendale Mill

Glendale Mill Sentry

Another photograph from the Spartanburg Area Conservancy's Glendale Shoals Preserve. This is one of the "towers" of the old Glendale Mill that still stand. Seeing it from this angle made me think of the sentry towers in European Castles for some reason.

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Moody View

Reflections and Ruins

This is another photograph of Lawson's Fork Creek in the Glendale Shoals Preserve in Spartanburg County. It is taken very close to the same place as yesterday's photograph if not the exact same location. I was trying out different compositions with the reflections and the trees. As I was developing the image I started to feel that it needed a more moody treatment and converted it to black and white. I think that it works for it. If you look carefully, you will see a couple of the old mill's chimneys through the trees and their reflections in the water. That is were the "Ruins" in the title came from in my mind.

In order to further accentuate the "moodiness" I made a few other tweaks to the image in development. First, I selectively darkened and brightened areas to try to lead the eye down the rapids. Next I reversed the expected sharpening of the image's elements. By this I mean that I reduced the sharpness of every thing except the water, and then I sharpened the reflections. To me this gives a sense that the reflections might be more "real" than the actual trees and ruins. It does at least seem to help convey the moodiness that I was feeling with the image. Finally, I added a slight vignette along the edges to bring the eye into the image.

Well, that is what I did and why I did them anyway. I hope it worked the way I intended them to.

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I'm back

Down Lawson's Fork Creek

It has been a while hasn't it? I've been dealing with a lot of stuff and hadn't been able to get out with the camera very much. Things have not really settled down, but I am trying to make time for photography again now that the weather is more agreeable. However, it does seem to like to rain on the weekends for some reason.

Earlier this week I went to the Glendale Shoals Preserve. It is a conservation preserve of the Spartanburg Area Conservancy based around the historic Glendale Mills property. Lawson's Fork Creek flows under an iron trussed bridge, over the mill's dam, and over exposed rock below the dam. The preserve has a couple of trails, numerous picnic tables, and some historic kiosks relating the story of Glendale Mills and the area's natural features. I didn't spend very much time there, but I do look forward to going back and exploring it in better detail.

This photograph is Lawson's Fork Creek as it re-enters it's wooded embankments below the shoals before leaving the Preserve.

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Maple Leaf

Maple Leaf

Where does the time go? I just realized that I hadn't posted today's image. This is my favorite shot from our walk on the Cottonwood Trail. I saw this maple leaf as we got close to the parking area at the end of our walk. The backlighting by the sun kind of caught my attention and I took a few photographs of it. There is still a little bit of the season's colors around if you look for them.

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Lawson's Fork Creek

Lawson's Fork Creek

Another image from our outing on the Cottonwood Trail. This is Lawson's Fork Creek which runs along and through the nature preserve. The particular area is surrounded by residential neighborhoods. There is also a Duke Power right-of-way on the property.

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A new find

Marsh

I recently learned about the Spartanburg Area Concervancy (SPACE) organization. It is a local organization that promotes natural conservation in the Spartanburg area. They have several properties which are open to the public with nature/hiking trails. The largest of them is the Edwin M. Griffin Nature Preserve which the home of the Cottonwood Trail.

We spent a couple of hours walking the trail this past Saturday afternoon. The trail is not very far from downtown Spartanburg. One of it's access area is at Spartanburg High School. It is about 115 acres of natural land on the banks of Lawson's Fork Creek. A surprising feature on the nature preserve is a marsh. There are also beaver dams that visitors can see along the trails in the wetland area of the preserve.

It is a nice area to walk and seems to be fairly popular as there were a couple dozen people on the trails at the same time we were there. These photographs are really just snapshots as I went just to get an idea of what the trail was like. We definitely plan on going back. I can't believe that I didn't know about this trail before now.

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