When I had a free afternoon, I wanted to take Highway 6 North. I had heard that the town of Hico had some really interesting locations. Along the way, I stopped a couple places for some pictures.
This was an old tractor with two flags. I tried to increase the exposure on the flags to brighten them up, but it started looking too manipulated.
Every Spring, there is a place on Highway 6 in Grimes Co. where there are always lots of cars parked because there are fields full of blue bonnets. This year,on the way home from Galveston, we pulled off the side of the road and got some good pictures.
and
We were In Galveston again last weekend, and I seriously worked on getting a lot of HDR shots.The stacks of rocks like I photographed last year were back, but not as many. This one had pretty good light, so I worked on it. This picture was well received on Flickr and ViewBug.
The shrimp boats in docked by the harbor seemed to me to be a good subject.
Ft. Crockett’s white canvas shades impressed me as a good subject as well.
And I wanted to get one of the Bishop’s Palace.
Across Broadway from Bishop’s Palace was an old house that had cement flower boxes that were crusted with moss.
Clarke’s workshop was in Tyler. On the way back, I stopped several times on Hwy 31 and got some road side images. Mostly around Corsicana. There was a place on the East side of Corsicana that had lots of old railroad wheel sets stacked up, making for interesting patterns.
West of Corsicana there was this abandoned house with an old car in the front yard, and cattle grazing all around it.
There is a railroad bridge on I-35W north of Itasca that I have always thought would be a great picture. I have tried several times over the years, and never gotten anything good. I finally got a 10 – 20 mm lens and thought maybe that lens would be what I needed.
Although I still was no able to get the image I really wanted this one was pretty good. Right there, I found an old, rusted machine used for planting, and got some pictures of that as well.
The TMCA Spring Workshop was in Abilene. So, we took Hwy 36 up through Hamilton. Along the way, we stopped a couple places and got some nice images.
I am getting a little more comfortable with doing these HDR images, but I would really like a better understanding of the various adjustments in Photomatix. These had very mild HDR effects applied to them.
We went to GalI decided it might be good to take a series of HDR image around Galveston. So, over the weekend, I went to a variety of places.
For some of them, I used a very light HDR application, but for other, much more intense.
This made me really start to consider these kinds of images in a different way. I am wondering if there would be any commercial value to these either as individual images or as a book.
I have converted some of the pictures of the old farm to Black and White.
I really like the atmosphere of these.
I have been intrigued by the idea of fine art prints. A CreativeLive seminar with Doug Landreth explored how he goes about making them. It was interesting, but there was not nearly enough explanation. In Photoshop, he overlays images with layers that he manipulates into patterns that add barely visible elements and textures to the image. The result is quite good.
As a first step in looking at that, I took some of the pictures I took last week on Highway 6, and transformed them into Black and White.
It turns out there are a variety of ways of producing Black and White images. One is simply to reduce the color saturation of the image. There are other “effects” in Aperture. They somehow use selective filters in the operation. For these, the one that I liked the most used a Red filter. I am not sure what that really means, but it had the effect of darkening areas of the sky until they were almost black.
It is almost like using a polarizing filter. The rest seemed to exaggerate the starkness of the image.
Looking at these calls to mind scenes from the old John Ford Westerns.
On my trip on Highway 6 to photograph trees, I happened to notice this old, derelict farm. There is something about the interaction of the decaying of the structures and the vegetation around them that make for an interesting combination.
