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Ok, maybe not exactly faking a sunny day. And when I took this series of photographs up at Hurricane Shoals park in Jackson county Georgia, was I really thinking about making them look like its sunny and pleasant outside. Because actually it was rainy, dreary, cold, damp and generally awful outside.

After being faced with another excruciatingly rainy and cold weekend here in North Georgia I decided I was going to take some photographs damn it, even if I had to dodge rain and try to keep my hands from freezing. Some of my photographer friends just hang up their hats when we are at the apex of nasty, cold, rainy and dreary Georgia weather. Which normally runs off and on from late November thru early March.

Myself, I go nuts. I need to take photographs, even if they all suck and I throw them all in my virtual trash can. I still think I learn from doing it. And I can sometimes pick up a few tricks that let me shoot in our nasty winter weather. Thats how I pulled off this trick.

Ok, here is the situation for this particular shoot. Now, I have to say I cheated a little here in regards to being to avoid people in the shot. This is a very popular county park, and if you see this post, you can see what I was dealing with in the past. Soooo….. first it was cold, no one is going to get in a cold river and two, the park was closed that day. So yeah, I’d say I kind of took advantage of no one being around. Accept maybe a few other crazy folks just like me with their cameras. But, we knew how to stay out of each others way.

Fading North Georgia Limited prints for sale thru March.

I started off just playing around with my kit lens, which is pretty good on the Pentax line. Not doing it for me today though. With the rain we’ve been having lately the river is really swollen and I’m not going to get close enough to really get the impact I want with a kit lens. So, I break down and attach my trusty old 200mm manual. Much better, now I can focus in on various aspects of the river and rock features for what I really want to show.

So, here are some before and after shots.

Before:	After:
Hurricane Shoals -04 Before
Before:	After:
Hurricane Shoals -03 Before
Before:	After:
Hurricane Shoals -02 Before

Maybe I took the colors a bit on the extreme side. I don’t know, I sorta like the look.

How did I achieve this effect? Here are the basics.

• I created an HDR (high dynamic range) of the image.
• Open the HDR in my image editing software and apply a custom filter that emulates Fuji Velvia 50 slide film stock. This warms up the image quite a bit.
• Create some custom layers to lighten and darken portions of the image. This is to fake a  hint of directional light.

Thats about it. So, what do you think? Like it? Let me know about any techniques you use on days like this.

Mark Hewatt is a North Georgia photographer.
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