A view of the stone bridge and barn at Gring’s Mill along the Tulpehocken Creek near Reading, PA. The mill was built by David Gring in 1811. The Miller’s house was built in 1831. The barn seen in this shot was built in 1896. Today Gring’s Mill is a park and recreation area and the buildings house the Berks County Parks and Recreation Department’s administration and maintenance offices. The Union Canal Trail that runs alongside the creek is a favorite with the local joggers and walkers.

9 bracketed RAW frames @ 1 stop increments shot 1-8-2011. HDR and tone map post processing via NIK HDR Efex Pro version 1.1. Textures from the commercially available texture packs from Distressed Textures and Flypaper Textures to give it the painterly “dusk light” look I was going for. Bird brushes also from Distressed Textures.

Sometimes watching grass grow is just what you want to do. At least until the next train comes along and blocks your view.

I shot this from the hillside along the parking lot of the Red Caboose Motel and Gift Shop on Paradise Lane in Strasburg in Lancaster County, PA. Single exposure with Sigma 10mm F2.8 Fisheye.

Farming is a thankless job requiring more hours than a human should be allowed to work, for little pay and little respect. Very few people think about the local family farmer until there is a shortage of some sort of food or meat product or some recall you hear about on CNN. If it weren’t for farmers you would have no turkey to eat, no stuffing to devour, no cranberry sauce, sweet corn or ham to stuff your face with on this Thanksgiving holiday. Next to the armed forces, police and firefighters, farmers are the next most important people protecting your way of life. The next time you see a tractor going down the road and it requires you to slow down a little until you can pass him, instead of cursing him, think about all that farmers do for you every day of the year and thank them for their service to society.

This Amish farm is located next to the Herr’s Mill and Herr’s Covered Bridge on South Ronks Road in Paradise, PA. I shot this as five bracketed RAW frames at 1 stop increments (setup via the Promote Remote) and then combined them into an HDR and tone mapped it with the new HDR Efex Pro plugin from NIK Software.

I was in East Hanover Park to shoot the Gingrich’s One-Room Schoolhouse on Saturday and I saw that they had this cool wooden bridge and weeping willow trees around it. A lot of community park’s idea of park layout means throwing up some swings and monkey bars and maybe a sliding board and a few picnic tables and calling it a day. So when a community puts some nice touches like a wooden bridge and nice landscaping, it makes the aesthetics of the park monumentally better.

I went looking for fall color and quiet ponds back on 10-24-2010 and I found this little pond near a horse farm on Hottenstein Road northwest of Kutztown, PA. It seemed like the kind of a place that you could sit and read a book without a care in the world.

I shot this as seven bracketed RAW frames at .7 stop increments and then combined them into an HDR and tone mapped it with the new HDR Efex Pro plugin from NIK Software.

I was driving around Saylorsburg, PA this afternoon photographing historic one-room schoolhouses and I passed by this long pond on Route 715 and noticed the clouds soaring low over it so I pulled off to the side and decided to shoot it. There was just a little too much breeze to make a good reflection but I still like the way it came out. It’s so hard to find any areas with a full array of colors around here because of the Summer drought. This particular area had some nice reds that have been missing in most areas I’ve visited this Fall.

I used the Promote Remote to shoot this as 13 bracketed RAW exposures due to the very wide dynamic range of the scene. Combined into an HDR and tone mapped using the new HDR Efex Pro plugin from NIK Software.

After an afternoon storm passed through the Oley Valley, the sun made a return and bathed this Hoch Road farm in golden light before setting. I shot this last year on 7-29-2009 and had posted a different shot of this farm previously but I wanted to do a version that was a little less heavy handed on the processing and a little different crop.
Original

This is an old barn from my travels through Union County back on 4-2-2010. According to the GPS in my car, the small town was called New Columbia. Hopefully by now, the farmer has planted some of his crops and is getting ready for another season of prosperous farming in North Central Pennsylvania.

You can tell this barn was used to store hay in the top 2/3rd of the building by the louvered windows. It’s important to provide a lot of ventilation for hay especially if it is cut wet and stored because it will have a tendency to spontaneously combust otherwise

I shot this as seven hand held bracketed RAW frames at .7 stop increments and then combined them into an HDR with Photomatix Pro and finally, tone mapped that image.

From my rainy Saturday 10-17-2009 trip to Glade Creek Grist Mill at Babcock State Park in Clifftop, West Virginia. This is the view from the bridge that crosses over the creek near the mill.

For more information on visiting the Mill and Babcock State Park, visit their web site.

I shot this in the drizzle as a single 25 second exposure with the Singh-Ray Vari-N Duo Filter on my Sigma 10-20mm. Some post processing touch up done with Topaz Adjust.

I just picked up a new Singh-Ray vari-N-Duo filter (thin mount) for use with landscape shots and I decided to take it for its maiden voyage by shooting the Kernsville Mill in Lehigh County Pennsylvania. Unfortunately there were a bunch of fishermen fishing right in front of the mill and with my goal of doing some long exposure shots with the water and the mill, that idea was squashed. So I improvised and shot the reflections on the water downstream from the top of the bridge.

The new filter really brought out some of the setting sun’s “magic light” and the colors just really popped. The damn thing costs as much as my first used car but I think it will pay dividends for waterfall, stream and fall foliage type shots. The unique thing about the filter is that you can “dial in” less and less stops of light for use with long exposure shots so that, for instance, waterfall shots come out even more milky white and dramatic. Instead of having to stack filters for the same result, a single filter can give you the same effect as blocking out up to eight stops of light. The filter also includes a polarizing filter to help block out glare on water surfaces. For more info on the filter, check out their web site.

Combined with multi bracketed HDR techniques, the filter realy provided nice results in my tests so far. This was shot as seven bracketed RAW frames then combined into an HDR and tone mapped in Photomatix Pro.