Jerome – The Blacksmi

I seem to have finally resolved all my technical issues with my monitor and software so that I can consistently get good results from my processing. And I’m starting to get my mojo back, thanks to joining a photography club and also setting up a weekly challenge for myself.

So I’ve started going back through some of my old raw images, looking for new material to play around with while I teach myself some of the features and hidden (to me) tricks of PaintShop Pro X7, Topaz plug-ins, and Lightroom. I’ve been watching quite a few YouTube video tutorials, as well as sitting in on live webcasts from Topaz for their products.

Today I pulled out some brackets from our 2011 weekend trip to Jerome, Arizona, where we toured the old Gold King Mine. It’s a veritable treasure trove of photo ops, and I highly recommend that you put it on your photography bucket list.

I processed this image first in Photomatix Pro 4.2 to merge the three brackets into an HDR image. I then did some further editing in Paintshop Pro X7, using some of the tips I’d seen on some YouTube videos today. For instance, I learned that the new X7 version of PPS has the “Magic Eraser” tool, which is a content-aware tool for removing things like dust and flare spots quickly and easily. It’s much easier than the “Object Remover” tool that I had been using. It really made a difference in cleaning up this image!

I really like this image, although I still might go back and try to remove that power line–it just seems to mock me!!

Oh, yeah, I also spent a little money online this week to pick up some other things that I’ve been putting off purchasing for my photography habit. I finally bought the cleaning solution and swabs to clean the sensor on my Nikon D700–so tired of seeing the spots in the sky on all my landscape shots. And this week I used my last bonus from work to order a Wacom tablet to make some of the editing tasks easier–things like fine selections for masks, for instance. I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on that tablet and learning how to use it.

Look for me here!
Facebook: http://Facebook.com/zannwalker
Smugmug: http://zannwalker.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/suzanne_hight
Wordpress Blog: http://zenofzann.com
iPhoneography: http://zanntastic.com
Instagram: http://Instagram.com/zannwalker
Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/suzannehight

More HDR from Fort Pike

Things have been a little slow at work lately, so I’ve had some more time to work on processing the images from our recent discovery of Fort Pike in southern Louisiana.

Just like my previous post, these images are all HDR’s created from seven brackets in Photomatix V4 and edited in PaintShop Pro X7.

These first two are inside the outer walls of the fort. The only light in the interior was the natural light coming through the portholes where the cannons used to be mounted. Therefore, HDR was really the only way to capture the whole dynamic range of light that our eyes were experiencing.

I always hate to see historical sites defaced with graffiti, but I have to admit that sometimes it makes for an interesting photograph. For this one, I went with a little more abstract processing using Topaz filters, something more “painterly” and less sharp.

Look for me here!
Facebook: Facebook.com/zannwalker
Smugmug: zannwalker.com
Twitter: twitter.com/suzanne_hight
Wordpress Blog: zenofzann.wordpress.com
iPhoneography: zanntastic.com
Instagram: Instagram.com/zannwalker
Flickr: flickr.com/photos/suzannehight

Fort Pike – Inside the Walls

On our recent trip to New Orleans by way of US Highway 90, we came across Fort Pike, an abandoned military facility from pre-Civil War days. We could see it from the highway and thought it looked interesting, so we made an unscheduled stop to check it out. And we were really glad we did, as it was both an interesting history lesson as well as a perfect setting for practicing shooting brackets for HDR processing.

The walls of the fort contain tunnels with portholes looking out toward the water where the cannons were mounted for defense. The brick arches and floors were still beautiful, and the light coming through the portholes revealed the green moss as well as the not-so-welcome graffiti that decorated the walls.

I used my Nikon D700 and my 28-300mm Nikkor lens on this shoot. The brackets were made while shooting from a tripod (of course!).

I’ve started processing some of these HDR images and look forward to sharing them! Here’s the first one that I did tonight.

Bayou Pierre Church

I was going back through my archives this evening, looking for something to play with, and I came across a folder of shots that I took back in June 2013 near Port Gibson, Mississippi. We had driven down there to visit the Windsor Ruins, and we just happened across this little bit of history tucked into the trees just off the country road.

This is what remains of the Bayou Pierre Presbyterian Church, founded in 1807. It’s a tiny little structure perched on a slight hill, surrounded by trees that are dripping with Spanish moss. I had a great time shooting brackets there for HDR processing–that is, until I found myself standing in the middle of a mound of ants. As I remember it, I was sick for several days afterwards from all the ant bites. That’s probably why I never got around to processing these photos, but now seems like a good time.

All these shots were taken with my Nikon D700 and the 14-24mm lens. Each one is an HDR processed from seven bracketed shots using Photomatix. Post-processing done in Paint Shop Photo Pro using Topaz Adjust.

A Valentine From the Abandoned House

Continuing my series of images from the abandoned house we found on Highway 278 west of Tupelo, Mississippi:

I’ve been holding on to this image ever since I started processing this series, just waiting for Valentine’s Day to share it with everyone. I found this abandoned dirt daubers’ colony in the middle of a blank wall in the front room of the house. The heart-shaped sculpture created by those peaceful little creatures on this cracked and peeling surface just struck me as beautiful!

I used my tripod to capture a series of brackets and then processed this as an HDR in order get all the texture in the dauber nest as well as the wall itself.

This image is best viewed large, and I can’t wait to have it printed on canvas and hung on my wall!

Shot with my Nikon D700 with my 14-24mm Nikkor glass. Processed in Photomatix, Paint Shop Photo Pro, and Topaz Adjust.

The Kitchen Has Seen Better Days

Continuing my series of images from the abandoned house we discovered on Highway 278 west of Tupelo, Mississippi:

The heart of any home is the kitchen, and I’m sure this house was no different. Upon entering this room, we were struck by the layers of wall covering that were visible–some fabric, some wood. The fabric looked like it could have even been old bed sheets, tacked to the wall. The colors were preserved or faded in broad swaths, depending on what, if anything, had covered them in the past. The linoleum floor showed the faint outlines of a pink floral pattern that must have been all the rage at one time. It probably even matched the wall covering when it was new.

Along the far wall was a row of large nails that had been hammered into the wood at odd angles. What were they for? Did they hang pots and pans there, maybe their coffee mugs? And what were the two faucets sticking up from the floor used for?

So much to see, so few answers. But old houses like these leave so much to the imagination!

HDR image created from brackets taken with my Nikon D700 and my 14-24mm glass. Processed in Photomatix, Paint Shop Photo Pro, and Topaz Adjust.

Check out the other rooms we visited before:

The Living Room

The Back Room

Continuing my series of images from the abandoned house that we discovered west of Tupelo, Mississippi…

After entering the door of the house and walking through the living room, you enter a back bedroom. But don’t go in there too quickly, or you could find yourself standing on the ground. The floorboards in the middle of the room have rotted to the point that there’s a huge, gaping hole, partially filled with the remains of carpet padding, where you can see the ground under the house.

I love the old windows with the triple panes at the top, through which the sunlight poured to illuminate the mess in front of us. An open closet contained a few old coat hangers, one with the paper advertisement of the local dry cleaners still attached, telling us that this place must have been inhabited in the not-too-distant past.

We walked through here very gingerly, staying close to the walls to set up the tripod and camera to get this shot. Enjoy!

Shot with my Nikon D700 and 14-24mm Nikkor glass. Processed in Photomatix and Paint Shop Photo Pro, using Topaz Adjust filters.

The Living Room

Continuing the tour of the Abandoned House on Hwy 278…

Upon entering the door of the old house, this is the sight that greets you. Even though it’s sad to see a house in such disrepair, one can’t help but try and imagine what happened in this room. Who lived here? Were they happy? Did something awful happen here that caused this place to be abandoned, to slowly return to the elements?

The room is coming apart, layer by layer. Wood paneling on the ceiling gives way to acoustic tile, which gives way to insulation and wood. Wallpaper gives way to older wallpaper, which gives way to wood. Multiple layers of flooring are peeling away, and the underlying structure is rotting back into the ground.

Only the brick in the fireplace seems permanent, although it too will eventually dissolve.

If only the walls could talk….

Shot with the Nikon D700 and my 14-24mm glass. Six-exposure HDR. Click on the photo and view as large as possible.

Abandoned House on Hwy 278

Wow, it’s been a long time! I’ve really been struggling with my photography muse for awhile now, trying to resurrect my passion for shooting and processing photos. Now that I work from home full time, I spend all day at a computer in my home office. I find it very difficult to get excited about spending additional hours in that same little room at the end of the day, processing photos. And during the winter months, I never get outside during the daylight hours from Monday through Friday, and the weekends just seem to fly by.

But….enough of the excuses. My goal for this year (I refuse to use the word “resolution”) is to do one decent project a month. Surely I can handle that!!

So, my project for this month–I wanted to take a road trip from Tupelo to Clarksdale along what was supposedly part of the “Blues Trail”. The Mississippi Delta is well-known as the birthplace of the blues, and I was hoping to see some of the old juke joints and music hangouts of some of the blues legends.

Well, long story short, most of those places are long gone, bulldozed and burned down to make room for big agriculture. We did find some interesting things on our trip to Clarksdale, and I’ll share those in the next few posts. But the most interesting thing we found, photographically speaking, was an abandoned house just west of Tupelo on Highway 278. We just happened to come upon it at the right time of day for some fantastic lighting, and the weather was beautiful (too cold for snakes and bugs), and the door was open….who could resist?

I used my Nikon D700 and my 14-24 glass to take a series of bracketed photos of both the exterior and interior of the house. I’ve begun processing them, but I’ll dole them out slowly here on my blog. Can’t wait to share them all with you!!

So, to start things off, here’s the front of the house that we found. Funny, it took finding something that had been abandoned by someone else to help me recover something that I myself had almost abandoned–my creativity.

Natural Zen in Sepia

Today was kind of strange. It was Christmas Eve Eve, and a Friday at that, so it was a day that I really didn’t expect to get much work done. But, adding to the weirdness of the day, my work laptop somehow acquired a virus, so it’s been out of commission since day before yesterday. I spent hours on Skype with our helpdesk yesterday trying to get my system up and running, to no avail. So today they’re shipping me a replacement laptop, which should arrive early next week.

There wasn’t much I could do today, other than check my email (using my own personal computer) and respond as necessary–and I only received two emails that required responses. By lunchtime I was ready to get out of the house and away from the computer. So even though it was a gray, overcast day, I decided to do a little shooting. I’ve been wanting to take some Zen-inspired photos to have framed for my home office, and I thought today would be the perfect time to do that.

Andy went with me on the excursion, and we drove out to Elvis Presley Lake, just north of where we live. We had not been there yet, so we weren’t sure what to expect in the way of photo ops. We found a nice lake with camping spots, picnic tables, boat ramps and fishing piers, and very nice bath and shower facilities.

I wanted to get some shots using very shallow depth of field, so I used my 50mm prime lens. We found a spot where there were some downed trees near the water’s edge, and I took a few shots before the cold wind literally drove us back to the car. Here are three that I processed this afternoon, using Paintshop Photo Pro X4 and Topaz Black & White Effects using the Sepia presets. I sized these to be 5 x 7’s, and I’m going to have them mounted in 8 x 10 or 8.5 x 11 frames to go in my office. I used similar processing on each one as I want them to be displayed as a set:

After warming up for just a minute, we walked over the hill where the wind was a little less biting, and took some shots of the boat docks and the fishing pier. There was a large sign on the pier that said “No Swimming”. Just a few yards from the entrance to the pier, I found this lying on the bed of pine needles, and couldn’t resist grabbing a quick photo to be processed in Topaz Adjust. Needless to say, this image will NOT be joining the others on my office wall, but I did find the photo to be oddly compelling:

If you like my work, please subscribe to this blog and feel free to offer comments. You can also find me on:
Facebook at ZannWalker Photography
Twitter @suzanne_hight
My Official Website at http://zannwalker.com

the Zen of Zann

…exploring my world with my Nikon and iPhone

Tag Archives: abandoned

Jerome – The Blacksmi

More HDR from Fort Pike

Fort Pike – Inside the Walls

Bayou Pierre Church

A Valentine From the Abandoned House

The Kitchen Has Seen Better Days

The Back Room

The Living Room

Abandoned House on Hwy 278

Natural Zen in Sepia