March 15-16, 2008: Road to Cheaha

I'm finally settled in at my new apartment for the most part. But, I still have a lot of unpacking to do. I've really put that on the back burner though. I have a roof over my head and food to eat. I don't really care if it's cluttered with unopened boxes.

I have better things to do right now. It's spring and the weather is warming up and the days are getting longer. I made an excursion to north Alabama to Cheaha State Park this past weekend. I really wanted some new scenery.

I took a long route to get to Cheaha because I wanted to go through downtown Montgomery to check it out for photo opportunities. You never know what lies along a road until you travel it.

I took these two images in Rockford on the way to Cheaha:









I was working on doing realistic HDR as opposed to all of the cartoonish/drawing style post processing I've been working on so far this year.

The first image was of waterfalls along the Highfalls Trail in Cheaha State Park. The next two are as described. All three are three images are HDR bracketed at -2/0/+2 EV.

The waterfall shot is all HDR. The cemetery and church shot are HDR masked over a tonemapped middle image in the bracket. There was some bad haloing caused by FDR tools. So I had to do a lot of masking to remove those halos.

The other photos I posted on Flickr have the North Alabama tag.

Overall, I was pretty happy with the trip. Some Flickr members liked the photos and others have been critical of them. But, I like the criticism. Most of it has been very helpful. If I want to keep expanding and improving my skills, I have to be open to criticism, whether it be positive or negative.