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.

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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.

I just came back from a short trip over to the old bridge and mill spillway in Buford, Georgia. This spot is (I think) part of the Gwinnett Environmental& Heritage Center, or possibly Brogan park. I can’t really be sure.

Anyway, I attempted this spot early on a Saturday morning. Biggest problem, I hate getting up early… and I got there around 8:30 am. Sometimes I can get away with this lazy behavior with a ND filter. But, the biggest problem you will run into doing this at this spot is that the sun points directly in the barrel of the lens.

Buford Mill Spillway - too bright early in the morning

So you end up with something ugly and not very useful. Kind of like the photo to the left. And I was actually hiding behind a tree attempting to get a decent shot (silly me.)

Fortunatly I was able to talk my family into letting me come back later that day and try again. So, we packed up and drove back over around 4:oo pm.  Arriving around 4:35 pm. Just so you have an idea if you’re using something like Google Earth  to figure out the angle of the sun, this was in late November.

Another tip when getting there is if you’re coming down 85 south is to take the Georgia Mall exit but head to the Lawrenceville off-ramp, not the Mall ramp. When you get to the bottom of this ramp which is a tight cork-screw, you will see a little old gravel road that leads directly down to the old bridge. Jump off right there and park directly above the mill spillway. Now, I can’t endorse this being totally legal, I’ve done it a few times, and I know lots others that do as well. But, I can’t say whether the park frowns on it or not.

Buford Mill later in the day. Much better.

The shot I got later in the day was much better. Which turned out something like the photo to the right. See more natural and landscape photography.

Now, this photo is actually an HDR composite with some post-work to pull off the final image. Some other tips for this location is its really tricky to find a nice shot. Its a wide spillway, and if you don’t want to attempt to cross the water then look for a little island that should center you directly below the entire dam.

Another thing you will have to contend with is the junk. This spillway is below the mall and a major interstate. And as you might have guessed by now, lots of crap. Bottles, cans, tape, string, paper, bags… its a real mess. So, you are going to spend some time in post cleaning this crap out of the image.

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Finally, I played around a little more in post to come up with one more interesting image. The first image is what the orignal unprocessed photo looked like.

Buford Mill Spillway instructional - original

This is the second, tone-mapped image.

Buford Mill Spillway instructional - toned

And finally, the finished photograph with some added texture and depth-meddling.

Buford Mill Spillway instructional - finished composite

I hope this little list of ideas help you come with of your own neat ideas on how to take a very plain and average photo into something much more interesting.

Oh, hey this stuff is some of the first work I processed on my new laptop. Which is a Lenovo Thinkpad SL410 . Its a great little computer for those that can’t swing a macbook pro or, have a lot of dedicated PC software and programs. Its super-fast and has a nice display. Also, very sturdy and so far, very dependable.