Marksville, LA

I have been attending meetings in Marksville, LA for the past few days.  Before going, I looked at a map and found there are two wildlife refuges on either side of Marksville.  Yesterday, I took some time to visit Gand Cote NWR.  It didn’t have a great deal to offer, but I think it is rather early for migratory waterfowl.  Anyway, I got a couple of good landscapes.

Grand Cote NWR

There was a rather substantial wetlands area.  The nature trail led up to it, and then a bridge led to an observation platform over the water.  These are two images taken from the bridge.

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Thursday is Photography Day

My Thursday afternoon schedule is rather flexible, and the last couple weeks, I have taken Thursday afternoons to take pictures around town.  Yesterday, I concentrated on the Southeast are of downtown and then went to the courthouse.

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Pink is normally an inviting color.  To have a wall and a door painted pink and then putting a big Keep Out sign on it seemed to me to be a contradiction. This was a vacant building on the corner of Eighth and Jackson.

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When is the last time you saw a building with a cistern for collecting rain on the roof? This is the Texas Fireproof Storage building on Eleventh and Mary.

Goldenrods

I mentioned in a previous post that on the way home from Galveston, I noticed that the goldenrods were blooming, and, since I have never gotten any pictures of them, I decided to run down highway 6 and get some pictures.

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Of course, there were a variety of insects associated with the blossoms, like bees.

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and a Beetle.

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Back on Hwy 6

A couple weeks ago, coming back from Galveston, I noticed the Goldenrods were out.  I have never gotten any pictures of Goldenrods.  So, I decided to take an afternoon and go back and get some.  I stopped at several locations, and will share those pics in another post.  But, as I was coming home, I passed by this abandoned farm.  All of the pictures of similar places I have taken were taken in the winter, and the lack of trees with leaves enhances the starkness of the image.  In this case, I decided, rather than coming back, that I would go ahead and take some pics.

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In doing some of the processing of the image, I added a vignette.  Then I wondered what it would look like with a negative vignette.  I think it enhances the feeling of this image.

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Producing an image

I want to write a longer post about what I went through to produce a specific image.  When I was coming back to the car after I took the pictures of the “Wacotown” sign on the building at fourth and Franklin, I looked and saw the combination of the clock on the WISD’s Mae Jackson Building and the ALICO Building.

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I used the exposure brackets in the camera to take three pictures – one correctly exposed, one under exposed and one over exposed, and used the HDR software to produce an HDR version of it.

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I liked that, but, somehow the clock was giving me an art deco vibe, and that made me wonder how this would look as a black and white image.  So, I took the HDR image and removed the color in Aperture.

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That had a rather dark and brooding nature as a result of the HDR treatment.  I decided to try something else, and used NIK effects Color Effects Pro on the HDR image to make a Black and White version.

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That made it a little darker and even more broody.  I tried Using NIK’s Silver Effects Pro on the HDR image and got this.

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That was really dark and broody.  It had almost an old horror movie feel to it, and it looked really grainy like it was shot on tri-X film and pushed.  So, I wondered what it would look like with less treatment.  I went back to the original, single image that was correctly exposed and used Silver Effects on it to get this.

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This is much “cleaner.”  I think I am going to make an 8×10 print of it, and put it in an 11×14 mat in a simple black frame.

The Dr. Pepper Museum

Another Waco landmark is the Dr. Pepper museum.

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While photographing the museum, I noticed about a block away, across the street from First Baptist Church were these two structures.  I believe they are grain silos, but I am not sure.  They appear to be long-ago abandoned, But, they are still interesting.

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Icons of Waco

We had a meeting of the HOTPPG a week ago, and Doug Box took us outside to do some shooting.  While doing that, I became interested in the refurbished Waco Hippodrome sign.  I went back there on Thursday to see what kinds of angles might exits, and I found one that I could get both the sign and the ALICO building together.

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