Posted on Aug.30, 2011, under Michigan

(Nikon D700, 28-300mm at 100mm, ISO 200, Exposure 1/125 @ f/16)

Port Oneida is an historic farming area in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. The area has an interesting collection of old farmhouses and out buildings. My wife and I were driving through the area on a less beaten path when we came across this farmstead. There was a farmhouse off to the right which was interesting, but I thought these two buildings had more character.

I had a couple of goals when processing this image. First, I wanted to tone down the patch of blue sky in the upper left corner of the image. Converting to black and white helped, as did adding a vignetted. However it still left a big bright spot in the upper corner so I used a technique that I had learned from watching some videos at The Mindful Eye, a web site run by Craig Tanner. Craig will oftentimes use selective scaling to make minor alterations to his landscape shots. I selected an area of the trees in the left corner and scaled them up a bit. I touched things up with a bit of cloning and did a minor crop of the image and the end result is that I was able to get rid of most of the sky. I also used some curves layers to selectively brighten and darken elements in the image. In the initial black and white conversion the building sort of blended in with the trees, so I used curves to brighten the building a bit. I also brightened some elements of the trees as well since they also were a bit flat from the conversion.

Copyright ©2011 James W. Howe – All rights reserved

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