A hike with the Hearthstone Hikers from the Pigeon Hill lot south to Cheatham Hill vial the Hardage Mill trail, returning by the Noses Creek trail. It was a hot and humid day or we might have gone further.
These pictures are not in the order I took them. For some reason unknown, the software will not order them as I wish.
The Sonny Day Hikers ventured to a part of the AT we had not hiked before. The first mile (up to the falls) is shared by the AT and Benton-MacKaye trails. After a break at the falls, we stayed on the AT for a while before returning to the Three Forks parking area.
It was a good day photographically, with nice light through the trees and not much wind. Found the best spiderweb in a long time in a spot where I could get a good background. We often find webs that can’t be seen from and angle with enough contrast to see them in the picture.
Some of us from the North Georgia Photography Club traveled to Lake Rutledge to attempt to photograph the Milky Way. We arrived before sunset and were rewarded with some excellent reflected light in the clouds and water.
The clouds stayed until about 2:00 am, but I left about 11:30 pm so I missed the stars in favor of getting home safely.
An exploratory hike by the Sonny Day Hikers turned out to be a very nice hike. The original intent was to turn around at the top of Deadennen Mtn, but most of the group chose not to go that far. The climb of Wilscot Mtn was enough. The distance from there to Deadennen Mtn is not that great, but it is a steep down/up and then reverse on the return. The trail itself is quite smooth and easy to walk.
More late wildflowers and mushrooms found again. And I played more with ICM photography.
A brief visit to the falls with visiting family. We hiked as far as the bottom of the steps, then drove to the West Ridge Trail to see the upper part of the falls, then had lunch at the lodge.
Not the best day or time of day for photography. Broken clouds and building thunderstorms, but very, very harsh light when the sun was not behind a cloud, and even then still very bright.
The falls are barely visible from the bottom of the trail because the trees have grown considerably in the past 25 years, and because everything is fully leafed-out. So limited photo ops.
A mixed bag of images from the last two weeks of August 2019. I was not shooting much, both because of the heat/humidity, the harsh light of mid-summer days and a lot of other things to do. So this is what I got.
As noted in my previous post, I’m playing with Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) for landscapes as a means to a little different sort of compositions when I can’t find something that grabs my attention.
In mid-August 2019 the Sonny Day Hikers did an exploratory hike on a bit of trail none of us had ever hiked before, and now we wonder why not. The trail is a relatively flat section of the AT, at least the 2.3 miles or so we traveled before turning back. A very pleasant, not overly difficult hike.
Surprisingly, we found a variety of wild flowers blooming. Most notable was three separate clumps of Turk’s Cap Lilys (Lilium superbum if you wan the Latin name.) According to our resident expert, these are rare in Georgia but more common further north.
Travelled by car, train and foot to the Meadows at Piedmont Park in Atlanta for this first ever ballooning event in the city. Not the best-organized event I’ve attended, but no problems either. Due to some soggy ground, the dozen balloons were more tightly-bunched than I would have preferred for photography, but ya work with what ya got.
The event was announced at 5-9 pm, and we arrived shortly after 5 pm. But there were no balloons until well after 6 pm, so we had a chance to walk around the venue and scout places to shoot from.
Once the ballooning began, things got very busy The balloons were limited to 50 feet in elevation, and each balloon was tethered by four lines. That meant it was difficult to move in among the balloons, so I stayed on the perimeter.
I had hoped for broken clouds and some color as the sun set, but that was not to be. I got only a single shot with any sort of sunset, and there we no backlighting of the balloons as the sun got low in the sky.
However, the glow went well. I had a very difficult time focusing since there was little to no pattern in which balloons would glow at any time, or if some of them would ever glow.
Still a good time overall, although I think I’ll go back to Helen next year rather than this event.
A variety of pictures. The weather has been very hot and humid, and I have not been out a lot. When I have been out, there has been very little color around, although I have not searched out any color either.
What I decided to do was to experiment with multiple exposures and ICM, aka Intentional Camera Movement. I walked a park near the house in search of tree trunks that would look nice when blurred against a green background. Those I found, but finding the right exposure and method for holding/moving the camera took many trials and errors.
Lastly, for sunrise, I chose to shoot a triple exposure rather than a single longer exposure. I had hoped to get a better texture in the water that way. You decide.