Messing with HDR

So I decided to jump on the bandwagon, and took some bracketed shots when I was wandering around on the roof of the Market Square Garage. These shots are looking wast-ish out toward the Sunsphere and UT.

For you n00bs, HDR is basically just a way of putting together some number of photos all taken at different exposures to get a picture with greater dynamic range. Check wikipedia for a better description.

Anyway, here are the first 3 source photos, in ascending order of exposure time:

I combined those to make this:

Looks nifty to me. Notice how it's not overexposed like the last photo, but you still get all of the detail.

Next one is from a different angle, but essentially the same location. I believe I changed the f-stop on this one, but I don't remember and and too lazy to check the EXIF data.

The end result:

I don';t like this one as much as the first. I think I need to mess with the levels a bit more. I do sort of like the light-star in the center. It does point out a flaw in my wide-angle lens though - it only has a 6-blade aperture, so the star only has 6 points. Were it a 7 or 9 blade aperture, it would have 14 or 18 points, respectively. However, it was half the cost of the Nikon lens, so I'm not going to complain a lot.

Evening photo: heart's-a-burstin'

This is a neat little berry. I have taken photos of the pink pod before, but they never came out well (again, wind problems!) By the time I came on this one at West Prong, the Heart's-a-Burstin' had burst! Pretty cool little berry. The photo is cropped to accentuate the in-focus area, and give a closer view than the full-frame image.

From plants

I also think my photo is a lot better than the one linked above :)

Weekend hiking

Trying to figure out what I'll be doing this weekend. Potential hikes include:

• Schoolhouse Gap
• Rich Mountain Loop
• Indian Flat Falls - I hear this one isn't actually 10mi up to the falls, closer to 2-3mi to the falls
• Meigs Creek Trail

Unsure whether I'm shooting for a longer hike, or maybe two shorter hikes, or just one short hike. Somewhat weather dependent I guess. Other ideas are welcome.

Evening photo: purple aster

Another shot from West Prong, this is some sort of Aster. They're hard to tell apart, and I don't think this one is fully bloomed yet. Merely a nice photo, nothing spectacular:

From plants

Nice weather

Finally got a break in the weather, and I got guilted into going outside by some co-workers. So I defaulted to going to Third Creek, where I had a pretty nice run. Afterwards I headed downtown where I got at least one or two nifty photos of Knoxville after sundown. Those will probably start showing up here in a week or so, after the rest of the West Prong photos trickle in. May even throw in some HDR junk just for fun!

Evening photo: tiny white flower

This is a crop from a larger photo that was mostly out of focus. Taken on the West Prong Trail, the wind was being annoying, so it was hard to get a good shot. This was the best I could manage at that point:

From plants

I think it's a White Snakeroot, but it's really hard to tell, as it was a cluster of blossoms, and all the photos in the books are from pretty far back. Still pretty, though.

Bonus photos: nuts

No, not those. Remove your mind from the gutter, please.

I'm talking ginormous acorns! At West Prong, in certain areas of the trail, the greatest danger was not bears; it was not my lack of food; it was the dastardly acorn! I nearly fell 4 or 5 times on the way back cause the damn things were everywhere. At times, I could hear 10-15 falling every minute. One passed about 2 inches from my head! I'm not kidding, it was actually a little treacherous because of all the acorns. Here's a picture:

From scenery

Speaking of nutty things, check this (badass) nutjob out:

From WhackyMe

This guy has freaking 8 foot long arms!

From WhackyMe

Evening photos: the ones you have been waiting for

Best part of the trip to Meads Quarry: MEESTER TURTLE! Dude (or dudette) was probably about 18" long.

First, the least impressive photos:

From animals

Now, for some more context:

From animals

Let's get a little closer:

From animals

Closer....

From animals

And this was about close enough:

From animals

I actually wanted to get a few inches closer than that, but decided it wouldn't be too wise. He looked slow, but vicious.

Evening photo: Meads quarry lake, part 2

Couple of more shots:

From scenery

From scenery

I like the second a lot more, it feels more composed, and the colors are better. The first was taken with flash (accidentally), but actually came out better than the other shot I took from that same position without flash.

Evening photos: asiatic dayflowers

Again, lots of these around the property. I think they're currently one of my favorite wildflowers.

From plants

From plants

Bonus photo: playing around

Was fooling around with a picture from West Prong (more photos upcoming!) and ended up with this:

From plants

That's just with futzing with the levels of various things in Camera Raw. I kind like it.

Oh, and I forgot to mention before, I've started to queue up these posts so I can do a bunch at once and leak them out over the course of a few days. Cause I know that everyone reading this (all 3.2 of you!) eagerly await a post each day, and I get kinda lazy and don't want to post every day. This one I actually just wrote up before going to bed tonight, though.

Evening photo: morning glory

There were tons of these all around the property at Meads Quarry. I had no idea that they were actually miniature morning glories until I started processing and identifying my photos from that trip. Interesting!

From plants

Really not sure about the color on this one - I remember it being a lot more vibrant.

Evening photo: chicory

Pretty chicory flower taken at Meads Quarry.

From plants

Hard to tell if the color is correct without having my monitor(s) calibrated. Looks nice to me though!

Evening photo: Meads quarry lake

A shot of the lake at Meads Quarry, an annex of the Ijams Nature Center in South Knoxville.

From scenery

I liked this shot. For a pretty quickly taken picture, it turned out nicely. I wish there had been no wind, but those are the breaks.

Evening photos: more from Piney

Wide-angle shot of my sitting on the bridge:


A crazed butterfly of death that landed on my pantleg:


The view from the top of the rocks:


Aaaaand, looking down the quarter-rotted ladder we had to climb up to that view:

Bonus photo: invisible rainbow

There's a (short) story behind this photo that I apparently forgot to post earlier. Driving back from Forks of the River a couple of weeks ago, I noticed a really cool rainbow up in the sky, with no rain in sight. This was very close to Meads Quarry, so I parked there and got out to see if I could get a photo. Well, it turns out the rainbow was basically invisible without my sunglasses on. Polarizing filter to the rescue!

Sadly, in the time it took me to get the filter on the lens, the clouds and sun had shifted enough so that the rainbow wasn't very visible anymore. *sadface* Still, it's a nice picture of the clouds, and if you tweak the vibrance and suchnot, you can sorta see it appear in the middle.

Evening photos: my deathwish

Oh looks, there's a log, it must be climbed!



Oh looks, it's slippery!

Hike: West Prong Trail

Today's hike brought me into Townsend to hike the West Prong Trail. It was advertised as a "Quiet Forest Hike" and held up to that pretty well. I arrived around 09:30, and during the ascent,only came by one pair of folks. I probably would not have even run into them if I hadn't been taking so many pictures.

I think in wetter times the hike would have been even more pleasant - there were several points where there appear to be smallish waterfalls, I'm guessing in the spring they're pretty cool. I believe there's also a stream along the first part of the trail that was also dried up.

There were a surprising amount of wildflowers along the trail - looks for photos of those in the next week or so. I even saw some that were new to me! Of course, that also meant there were a bunch of flying, stinging annoyances to avoid, but them's the breaks.

I ate lunch at the West Prong of the Little River. There's a trio of campsites right on the river, they look like a pretty nice play to spend a night or two. I was a bit surprised that only one of them was occupied when I showed up. Mmmm Subway!

There was only one really good view, right before the intersection with Bote Mountain
Trail. I haven't checked the photos yet, but hopefully I got a decent shot or two.

The hike back down to the car was pretty uneventful. I played around some with the wide-angle lens - we'll see how those photos come out later. I think on the way back there were 3 or 4 more groups of people coming up the trail. Still nothing too bad, and somewhat expected for a nice day in the Smokies.

Close call: on the way back I noticed a large-ish (~6-8" diameter) hole in the ground that looked like it had been hollowed out by an animal. Of course this intrigued me, so I went to peer in for a closer look. Yeah, you guessed it, freaking thing was full of yellow jackets, or some other wasp-like creature that looked amazingly similar. So .... no pictures of that. I'm dumb, but not quite that dumb.

Critter count:

• Spiders: Many
• Garter snake: 1
• Salamander: 1
• Caterpillars: 2
• Yellow jackets: way too freaking many
  

Evening photo: up the dry streambed

Kind of overexposed, but I want to show off the wideangle lens. This streambed usually drains into a medium-sized waterfall. Not this day!

Evening photo: circle burger!

I have no more words. Here's a picture.

Evening photo: my crazy hands

Presented without comment:

Evening photo: kinda lame

This looked cooler when I was there, but I'm posting it anyway.

Evening photo: Watch out!

If only the real zombie apocalypse were this obvious:

Evening photo: Rowing man

Way close up picture of the man rowing in downtown Knoxville. Notice as he sniffs the tower in the distance:

Evening photo: Downtown

From across the street:

Dinner: Curry and Couscous

Tonight I prepared some curry from a bottled sauce, along with some Israeli couscous, as I'm quite unhappy with my rice cooker at the moment (most of the nonstick coating has worn off :().

Anyway, the curry sauce was Kitchens of India Bombay Kadai. Holy macaroni Batman, that stuff was wicked tasty. Pretty spicy, yet not spicy enough to drown out the flavor, and the flavor was pretty excellent. Definitely something I'll be buying again, if I can remember where I bought the dang stuff!

The couscous recipe I pretty much made up on the spot:

• 1 cup Israeli couscous
• 1 cup chopped white onions
• 2 cups boiling water
  
• 3 Tbsp Olive oil
• 7oz crushed tomatoes
• 7oz corn niblets
• fresh basil, salt, and pepper to taste

Brown the onions in the olive oil in a large saucepan. Add couscous and brown that as well. Meanwhile, add tomatoes and niblets to a pyrex measuring cup, at least 2 cups large. When the couscous is browned, add basil, salt, and pepper. Next, add boiling water to measuring cup, bring total amount to 2 cups. Add this to the couscous mixture in the saucepan. Cover and simmer for 8-10 minutes, or until water is mostly absorbed. Eat.

Anyway, that was dinner. Surprisingly successful for basically no planning.

Evening photos: Great Blue Lobelia

Tonight's photos are from Forks of the River. Near the end of my adventure there, I came on an entire little meadow filled with these things. Unfortunately I was getting antsy, and my memory card had filled up. I deleted a few photos that were obviously unworthy (even on the LCD) and snapped a few shots of these beautiful flowers. I wish I had gotten some more of higher quality, but that's life.

Evening photos: butterfly weed

A couple more pictures from Forks of the River:





The colors on both seem off, but it's hard to tell if it's my monitor, as they both look wildly different just between the different monitors I have here. Maybe I'll get one of those calibration whizbang gizmos soon.

Evening Photos: caterpillar attack!

From Forks of the River WMA, I bring you a writhing mass of caterpillars devouring a branch:



I took some other picture where the caterpillars were actively eating a leaf, but none of them had everything in focus that needed to be. Sadsauce.

Today's hikes

Holy Crap the weather has been awesome the last two days - too awesome for even yours truly, Captain Lazypants of the HMS Couch, to stay inside. Instead, went out with a couple of friends to the Cumberland Plateau for a couple of Hikes.

The original plan was to hike Meigs Creek Trail, however on further reading, it seems there are 18 or 19 stream crossings, with some maybe up to our knees. Needless to say, that plan was postponed (maybe until tomorrow, I'm much crazier alone). Instead, we ended up at Piney River near Spring City. First up was Piney Falls. This was a nice little hike for the most part.

However, the falls were.... unimpressive to say the least. It seems that the Cumberland Plateau, uh, has dried up over the summer. We were literally able to stand right in the middle of the tops of the falls and look down below. All dried up. If you examine the map, you can even see us walking straight up the streambed!

Next on the list was Twin Rocks Nature Trail, a couple of miles away. I enjoyed this hike a little more - it was all trail. Piney Falls, for the first .5-.75mi was just a bulldozed path through the forest. Hellalame. At the top was a nice overlook with a fenced-in stairway (others insisted it was a ladder....) and a fenced in bridge beyond that. The overlook was nice, but would be a lot more impressive when the foliage isn't quite as dense. It wasn't a terribly long hike, so it's probably worth going back later. By the way, ignore the long straight line at the end of the map... I accidentally turned the GPS back on at the next hike.

So, final hike was possibly the most traumatic. Not because of the hike itself, but the journey there. We decided that getting to the nice long suspension bridge along the Piney River Trail was more hike than we wanted for the end of the day, so we figured driving to the other end of the trail and hitting up the bridge close to there would be easier.

Hike: easier. Drive there: less easier. My poor little Civic spent most of its time in D3. And we missed the turn off the first time. We end up trying to follow my nigh-useless Garmin down another gravel road. According to the GPS, the road should have been about 3 miles long. Well, after about a mile, we passed some guys sitting on their lawn chairs with their dogs. About 50 feet later the road dead-ends.

Yeh, awesome. Luckily one of the gentleman was nice enough to guess at which road we should have turned at.

Once we finally made it to this other trailhead, it was a pretty short hike over to the bridge, a fairly unimpressive steel truss. Oh, and another dry riverbed!

On the plus side, that trail seemed extremely nice, and worth going back to when I'm up for a longer hike and/or when there's actually water.

Still, all in all I got 4.5-5mi of hiking in.

Lessons:

• The Cumberland Plateau trails were deserted. We saw exactly one other hiker all day
• The Cumberland Plateau trails may have been deserted cause all the water was gone
• Don't trust the GPS all (most? any?) of the time
• If you think you might try other trailheads, map them ahead of time
• The Civic is not in fact four-wheel drive, but seems to be able to survive

Anyway, I'm still working through other sets of photos, so you'll have to wait awhile for pics from this trip.

Evening photo: unidentified pink flower

Another flower from Forks of the River. I should know what this is, but I totally don't. Will try again later.

Evening photo: red velvet ant

This isn't a particular great (or even passable photo), however, it's something I have never seen before: a red velvet ant. Very scary looking critter. Unfortunately, also a very fast critter - after chasing it for 2 or 3 minutes, I never managed to get a shot that was both in focus, and of the entire creature. So, all you get this in-focus shot of the rear end:



Also, I realize the bottom right of the previous photo (the partridge pea) is very poorly photoshopped, so I'll be going back and fixing that one later. That's all for now!

Evening photo: partridge pea

The original, with a little blur added in PP:


Converted to black and white:


In my opinion, this was a pretty good candidate for black and white - there's a good amount of contrast in the original photo and it just looks kind of cool.