I took the tripod out of the car when we had to travel over the holidays and today I am regretting that it hasn’t made it back into the car.  I stopped at the cemetery in the village to get a picture of the stone house and wall at the front.  I have been passing this building for months since my interest in photography thinking it would be a great subject for a picture.  I was not disappointed after stopping.

I attempted to take a 3 exposure bracket without the tripod and the resulting picture had too many ghosts.  The Photoshop Elements program did a great job aligning the building but the background trees had ghosts.  I adjusted my strategy to the processing.  I started with the normal exposure image and processed it through Topaz Labs Adjust utilizing the Heavy Smooth HDR filter.  A few small tweaks to the levels and contrast once back in Elements to produce the final image.

The next time I pass through the village with some cooperating light I will be stopping to explore this building and surrounding stone wall more closely.  There are some iron fences in the stone wall that look promising.  It is snowing out now, maybe tomorrow will be my next chance.

A couple of weeks ago Levi Moore posted about selecting your top 10 pictures of 2011 into a separate album which he would list on his blog (Your Top 10 Photos of 2011) in a collection of photographic goodness.  Although I had only started taking photography seriously this summer I decided it would be good to see what I had created over the past six months.  The thought just crossed my mind that I should also include those pictures here as another record of my growth(?).  I’ll let the images speak for themselves…

#10 – Writer’s block

#9 – Simple and delicate

#8 – Unbelievable colors

#7 – Refusing to give up

#6 – Silhouette

#5 – 4 image panoramic over Mohawk River

#4 – Alone

#3 – The path less traveled

#2 – Cold morning

#1 – Apple field