I love windmills...

Enough said?

Taken in the Potomac State Forest in West Virginia.

A good way to end a vacation!

This was taken this past summer from a Paddle Wheeler on the Connecticut River near East Haddom Connecticut.

You have to take an old steam locomotive to get to the Deep River Landing and then take a cruise up to the large bridge at East Haddom.  It was a wonderful day and a great way to say goodby to the kids!

Another Topaz

Perhaps I should worry that the images produced when using the Topaz filters (http://www.topazlabs.com/) are not photographs at all (even though they start out that way).  I spent some time seeing what the different filters did to different type of photos.  The photo shown below, taken at my sister-in-law's house, struck me as really neat.  The photo was terribly underexposed, taken at sunset, and was not really worth saving (but I seldom delete anything!).  I tried using the "simplify" filters and came up with:

Real? No!  Interesting? Yes! For those wondering, the following is the original photograph.

As always, click on the image for a larger view.

Are you laughing at me?

This has been a strange winter so far. 

This is a shot of the bench in the back yard a few days after the "blizzard of 2012" (December 26th).  I like the way the snow is drooping, making the bench smile at me!  I took the photo of the picnic table just before the snow stopped.  According to the National Weather Service we had 12.5" of snow during the storm.  It took two weeks for the snow to finally melt.

A little more Topaz

I am still trying to see what all I can do with the Topaz programs.  I like the fact that they can be accessed directly from Lightroom, and I can see where it will take a bit of time to really learn their true value.  Here is one that surprised me a bit.  This is a snowflake photo that shows some amazing colors--presumably because of slight color differences that are not visible in the original image.

Keep in mind that the snowflake itself has no color!  As usual, you can click on the image to get the full-scale version.

Photography (or art?)

I recently purchased a copy of Topaz filters (http://www.topazlabs.com/) and started playing with them this past week.  I am actually hoping to  use the program to increase the readability of some old civil war letters I have, but decided to test it on some of my photos (the Creative focus group of the local photo club loves this program!).  It is amazing what one can do with a photo that you think should be interesting, but turns out to be a bummer for one reason or another.  Below is a photo of a sculpture on the IU campus that was "OK", but didn't really look all that good.

I think it is much better than the original!  I will try and post a few other examples over the next few days.

Making it look better!

I was pleased to see that the county commissioners had done a "makeover" on the Huffman Mill covered bridge.  While their work was excellent I decided it could use a bit more touching up, so I removed the  guard rail, moved the bridge sign to the South end, removed the support cables on the West side, and straightened the slight lean that had developed (click on images to enlarge).

If you want to see what the bridge has looked like over the years look at the following images!  A great deal of credit for getting the work done belongs to the Spencer County Historical Society--Thanks!

This is an old photo showing the bridge in one of its worst conditions.  I don't know the year, but it is definitely pre- 1960.

In this photo, the bridge was a "natural wood" color (or perhaps painted brown).

The bridge also went through a green-white phase.  The beech tree to the left is the dominate tree today (seen above the bridge roof in the top photo)