The Newport bridge on a crisp October day. It’s a little digital around the edges, but it will do until I can get out there with the Pentax 6×7 and some SFX this spring.

I love finding old gems when I’m cleaning out the old archive closet. This was taken in the spring of 2005 in Floyd County along with Blue Ridge Parkway . I had processed it before, but I was never really satisfied with the outcome.

The raw material isn’t super great. I’ve learned a lot in 5½ years, particularly about the necessity of a good tripod and having bracketed images to work from, but I’ve also learned a couple of things about post processing and I think I’m finally pretty satisfied with the result.

I’d love to give processing notes, but I manhandled it to thoroughly (and often in circles) that I would’ve had to take notes. Which I did because I didn’t start out knowing that the result would amount to anything.

I love revisiting old pictures with new techniques. The photos below were all single exposure faux-HDR images processed with Photomatrix. I’m a firm believer that some images are helped with exposure compression and a little local contrast boost and some aren’t. I think these did really well with it.

I can’t believe it has been two years since I’ve been down to Mount Rogers. I wish that I could reminisce more about what a magical place it is, it’s unique landscape dotted with wild ponies and wind blown trees, but I’m pretty sick with some sort of summer ick. It is making my head swim pretty badly, so I’ll have to leave you with just a photo.

I needed a good bit of processing on this one to really bring out the mood that I saw in it. The overlay is from my Rollei’s viewfinder, plus a nice rustica curve and some general tweaking.