It’s another cold blustery day in PA and the big storm that just pummeled the mid-west with snow reached us overnight in a very weakened state.  Not much to see other than very cold snow blowing across the fields in the valley.  None the less I ventured out to the Pine Creek Cemetery to visit some of my revolutionary war brothers for a min.   I’m sure that wherever they are they aren’t cold.   But I can tell you that their final resting place here….. is very cold indeed.

The problem with photography as a hobby is that sooner or later everybody slips into a funk.   I’m there right now.   My unsorted folder of images has barely been touched because I just haven’t had the creative energy to take pictures.  Maybe this month will be different.

(5 min later)

I guess it helps to explain that the snow had just recently fallen in my back yard during the night and this image was taken before the sun and win had managed to knock the snow off of the branches.  This is not award winning work.  Its not even good photography.  It breaks rules and doesn’t have a reason to do such.  It’s simply a quick snapshot, something for me to reference to my buddies that live in places that don’t get snow.  

This is another panoramic experiment using a local landscape as the backdrop.   I could have used my wide lens to take this shot but instead I opted to use a 70-300mm lens and then use a program for Linux called Hugin Batch Processor to stitch the images together.  It gives me an overall larger image than a single shot through a wide lens would give me and I get the detail from all of the shots combined, which in turn gives me a much bigger end print size.  The picture itself … its ok… nothing I’ll win any awards for but the process to get there was quite interesting and I look forward to creating more images in the future using the same method.

Sometimes its worth the time to just stop and wait for the right photograph to you.   And I did just that with this image.   Sit along side a creek bed in fall and sooner or later photographs will float right up to you.

When the snow showed up in PA this year in October with the trees still having their leaves on them I was rather disappointed as I had not yet to really get out and get into a good photo session.   And now it snowing,which is going to ruin the rest of the season as the leaves will fall fast.  (and they did by the way)  So I tried to make the best of the situation and take as many pictures as I could while it was snowing outside and then archive them until I was in the right frame of mind to process them for consumption.  Well I started that process on Jan the 9th and this is the first image from that collection that I worked on in earnest.  I’m not sure I like it yet but…. it has some qualities that I like so I’m posting it up… I hope somebody enjoys it.

Another image from my October photo-shoot that I was originally unsure about.   But now in January looking at the image I really like the mixture of colors.

Seven mountain ranges converge on the area called “World’s End State Park” and give the area a very unique topology.  An added effect of all the mountains in the area is that there is plenty of water flowing through the park…as shown in my image of The Waterfall in Black and White.  I initially wasn’t sure of the quality of this image in its original color capture but instead of tossing it to the side I decided to convert it to a B&W and see what detail I could re-capture.   The end result was worth the additional efforts as the cascade of water flowing over the old dam really gives me the sense of the power being held back by the dam itself, and the waters undeniable influence on the dam and the stream bed.

Twin Falls near Jamison Run also known as the MCelhatten Reservoir which heads Mcelhatten creek, which in turn flows into Keller Reservoir.  This is one of those places that only the locals that live near by know about.  I actually found out about it via a geocaching site quite near the falls and it was the only reference to the falls I could find at the time.   This shot was taken on my 2nd trip to the site in 2 days as the 1st trip yeilded very poor quality images.

One of the wonderful things about digital photography is the versatility that comes from the craft.  One can take a digital camera with one lens and take a myriad of different styles of images.   I’d played with panos in the past but this has been my first concerted effort.  The original compiled image measures over 7 feet long and took the computer an hour to process.  While the day was somewhat hazy I achieved my goal.   The next step find a printer and a frame for this 7 ft monster. 

I was out in a local trail area called the Enduro Trail. Its part of the Kisatche National Forest area in Louisiana and its geared towards ATV usage. And this year the majority of the areas had gone through a controlled burn to “help” mother nature along. I’m not a big fan of controlled burns. Mother nature did just fine on her own before we came along to “help” out. Anyways getting off of my soap box the purpose of my trip was to get out of the house and take some landscape & HDR images as 2008 has been a slow year for me photographically speaking. Winter Mushrooms is the 1st HDR image I’ve processed out of the collection of photographs taken from that session and I’m loving it. The image seems to really stand out in its coloration without being surreal as so many images on the net seem to appear with the HDR technique applied to them nowadays. So yea, this is it. HDR applied realistically.