This afternoon, I got a chance to help a friend out, and also enjoy a good time!
I have known Greg Ramirez for over 12 years now, and it is always nice to have a chance to help him out.
So to this afternoon, I got a chance to go down to Exton Beverage to participate in their “Spring Sampling”!
and never passing on a chance for doing some photos, and sampling some good beers, I took a little time to capture some of the following images which are now only available on the Exton Beverage Facebook Fanpage.
2011 Spring Sampling - Exton Beverage
My next technical task, is to figure out a better way to display Facebook images in my Blog.
What is always very interesting at First meetings that start via the internet, is the real person behind the profile icons!
Also helps with not having to create or bring “Hello/My Name Is” name tags!
Anyhow…
We meet at the main parking lot for the mansion at Hibernia County Park, and then drove down the hill toward the “Old Damn” Area, which was already rather full with fisherman.
From the parking lot, we started down the Forge Trail, which follows the West Branch of the Brandywine Creek.
The Kit includes a 0.6ND, 0.9ND and a 1.2ND, and the concept of playing with an additional 9 stops was very intriguing, especially around water!
When the group got to a cleaning next to the water, all the tripods sprung into action, and camera bags flying open in all directions.
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Not wanting to be left out, I started to look for a good entrance point into the water, and then waded in.
It was cold, was not too bad.
On the way back to the trail, I did manage to slip, and dunk my arm put to my elbow in the creek!
My vest did touch the water, but the pocket liners kept everything dry!
I did not need to lose another camera to water, like I did back in college at Watkins Glen (NY) when my Canon A-1’s neck-strap broke.
We continued down the trail toward the small fishing pond, where there were many people enjoying the day.
Stopping at the small little bridge, we spread out to capture the sights around us.
One vary popular subject, was the small little water fall on the down stream side of the bridge.
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From the bridge, we head down Lion Heads Drive and toward “The Wall”.
After a little stop, we found another interesting area, which had a very strange attribute.
As one walked from the road toward the creek, there is a large area that has an intense orange color in the dirt and a blueish sheen.
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Once on the other side of the mess, I crossed a little island, and found a spot.
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We turned around at Cottage #1, and headed back to the parking lot.
When we got back to the small fishing pound, Jason headed directly back to his car via the trail, while the rest of us continued up Lions Head Drive.
We passed the Mansion and headed back down the dirt road to the Upper Damn Area parking lot.
In the parking allot, we chatted some more, and tossed out ideas of where and when the next Meet-Up will be. Details will be Posted on Facebook and Flickr groups.
From there, we went our separate directions.
When I got home, I began to transfer and process my files, and while showing my daughter my new images, I was able to show my daughter these two images, which I quickly turned into a combination “Poster”.
Hibernia County Park (Oct 2010 vs Apr 2011)
All and all, I think folks had a good time!
Thanks to all those folks that came out, and I look forward to our next adventure!
I am happy to announce that the “The Kim Wood Team” has started to include some of my Covered Bridge project that I started last year!
In future posts, we plan to highlight the various Covered Bridges that dot the Chester County area, and are a wonderful idea for day-trips with the family!
It was another Saturday in the later winter, and there were reports that some rain was on it’s way, but by mid afternoon, the kids were too filled with energy to spent any more time inside.
So we packed up the car with Madison’s scooter and Logan’s bike, and we head up to Uwchlan Hill Elementary School to get some fresh air and exercise.
When we got there, we noticed two other families also had the same idea, and were enjoying the usually warm day.
As we walked around the school, playing on the various pieces of equipment, I was continuously pointing my camera to the sky, to capture all the dark storm clouds that were crossing our area.
At first, I let the camera’s sensors take care of the exposure, but in reviewing the images on the little LCD screen, I decided to switch into manual mode, with some setting as high as 1/4000 at F16 ISO 100, which was definitely underexposing the my captures bu 2-3 stops, but at the same time, giving more depth to the clouds as the flew by.
During the outing, I took around 350 images, and when it came time to edit them, I had to look very carefully, 1) because the images were very dark; 2) there were only subtle differences between some of the frames.
I was really surprised to find so few images with lens flair, especially considering that in many cases, I was shooting directly into the sun. What I found very intriguing, was some of the color halos that I was getting around the sun. It was easy to see that I was pushing the limits of the CCD on my camera!
After making my initial selections, I used basic Lightroom corrections to try and enhance the images, which worked in many cases, but I wanted to get a little more.
I then imported some of the images into Photomatix, where I applied mostly default settings in the enhanced tone-map section, plus added a little color temperature warmth to some of the captures.
Looking forward, I plan to use this underexposure technique again when faced with similar scenes, I only hope, that I will be able to hold the foreground detail…
