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)

Really small critters

I finally spent the time to replace the rather expensive incandescence bulbs in my Nikon Model M with high intensity LED lamps (using a small desk lamp from Ikia).  The result were better than I expected!  Here is a dark field image of some rotifers that were in a dish filled with rain water in my flower garden.

They are not sharp since they are moving rather rapidly, but all in all they don't look bad!

Soon......

Many of my summer garden seeds have germinated and are thriving in the garage!  It is predicted to be in the 70's most of this week, so maybe I can get started turning the soil.  I checked my garden yesterday, and the winter greens (spinach, kale, arugula) are still thriving, and a number of plants that normally don't overwinter look like they will revive if we don't get a late hard freeze.

Photoshop playtime

Mostly I was just bored, so I started playing around with the various blending modes in Photoshop.  I still don't understand them, but I like some of the things you can do.  This is actually a vertical panorama that didn't look very good, so I used the edit/fill command to fix the empty parts and then flipped part of the image and played with the blending.  Chances are I could never repeat the process!

Action Stereo

I love stereo photography (no kidding!).  Most of my images are taken using the so called "cha cha" method, where you take one photo and then shift the camera a few inches to the right for the second image.  One setup I have uses two Canon "point and shoot" cameras and software developed to override the built-in firmware.  This allows the cameras to be synchronized quite well, as shown by the ax in mid-flight below.

and in anaglyph...

These shots were taken at the Lincoln Village in Rockport Indiana.

I have no idea

Just another bug.  The total length of this one was about 12mm.  I am not sure why, but I thought his head and "shoulders" looks almost robot-like.  I guess I have been watching too many sci-fi movies.

The Blue Dragonfly

I have probably several hundred photos of dragonflies, most of them out of focus or otherwise not very pretty.  This one is not terribly good, but I like it anyway.  I shot this hand-held using my 70-300mm zoom with extension tubes.