Barn in the Wind

This barn is outside Culpeper, VA along Zachary Taylor Highway (Rt 522). There is a bend in the road there with some great scenery, and I always stop when going to my parents house who live down near Louisa. On Sunday, I went down for a visit and even though the wind was blowing something fierce, I pulled over to take some images of the barn. I loved the clouds and the deep blue sky. This is an HDR image processed in Photomatix and then imported into Lightroom to have one of Matt Kloskowski's lightroom presets applied (Matt's Midnight Effect). Some further tweaking and cropping got me to where I was happy with it. I debated about the top of the crop, should I or should I not include the clouds in the upper corners? Should this just be blue sky? I decided to give it a bit of cloud to help hold the corners. Not completely convinced though. Thanks for stopping by.

(Where was this taken?)

Mini-Earth

I happened upon an interesting idea (at least interesting to me) that I am going to explore a bit more. I was out playing with the kids this weekend, and we were kicking around the soccer ball (they are taking a Lil Kickers class). I started throwing the ball up in the air and as it had a highly reflective surface and the sun was setting, it was catching the light and looked very neat. So I ran inside and grabbed my camera (of course). Then I began to experiment with throwing the ball up in the air and taking pictures of it. Lots of weird angles, bad shots, bad backgrounds, near hits to the lens, etc. But the idea was interesting. With the lens on wide angle, the ball did not have to go very high to make it look very small (but the more hang time you have the more shots you can take per throw). The few things I figured out that I want to work a bit more on were: 1) find an even more reflective ball so that I can potentially see more of the surroundings and 2) work on getting a nice background.

Sometimes you just have to play and experiment to see things a bit differently. Hanging out with the kids really opens my eyes at times to things my adult brain might not have thought about.