I flew out to North Mississippi over the Memorial Day weekend to visit my parents and other family members.  My parents live in the same community where I grew up, although not in the same house where we lived when I was a kid.  Now they live in a small house on beautiful Lake Mohawk in Tippah County, where we used to go swimming in the summertime.  My parents bought the property years ago.  It was just a little cabin with a screened in front porch, but over the years they’ve added a couple of bedrooms and a bathroom, enclosed the front porch and made numerous other improvements, and they’ve lived there fulltime for I-forget-how-many years.

It’s such a change of pace to visit there in the summertime.  It’s so hot and dry and brown here in the desert, and to suddenly be confronted with all the green foilage and humidity, it’s almost overwhelming.  Even though I spent my first twenty-five years in this area, I sometimes forget just how muggy it can get in the summertime.  But each time I return there, I find myself drawn once again to the beauty of the rural setting and the peacefulness of the lake.

"The Cabin"

I took all my camera gear with me on this trip, including my tripod, so I could get some good bracketed shots.  It’s been a little while since I’ve done any HDR processing, and I was hoping that the dense shade around the area would present some good opportunities to use HDR to tease out the details in some shots around the lake.  As it turned out, I didn’t have as much time to use my camera as I had thought I would, since I was having so much fun visiting with the family.  But I did manage to get enough exposures to give me plenty to work on this week.  I’ve processed two tonight (shown in this post) just to get an idea of what I’ll be working with.

"The Dock"

Both of these HDR images were processed from bracketed RAW shots (-2.0/0.0/+2.0) taken with my Nikon D5000, tripod mounted.  I used Photomatix to combine the images, and then used PaintShop Pro X3 to further enhance them.

It’s pretty late now, and I’m still on Central Daylight Time, so it feels like it’s two hours later than it is here in Arizona.  So I’m going to call it a night and leave you with these two shots.  But stay tuned for more to come later in the week.