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?)

High Altar in High Def

Good evening. Sorry about the delay in getting some images posted. December is a hugely busy time of year with 2 birthdays and Christmas all within a week of each other. Anyway, I finally have gotten some time to process some images from my trip to the Washingtion National Cathedral with my photo club. This is my first high dynamic range image. I used Photomatix to put together 3 images which are -2,0,+2 stops in exposure. This helps get more of the detail that your eye can see but the camera cannot record in a single image. I have been taking a lot of 3 exposure brackets like this to play around with in the future. By the way, this is the High Altar at the Washingtion National Cathedral. Thanks for stopping by.