The Stones of Stone Valley

Two or three times a week (occasionally more) in good weather I walk about 4½ miles on the nearby Stone Valley trail system https://adklaurentian.org/?page=stone_valley_trail.html. I usually carry my camera and photograph whatever catches my eye and brightens my day. Here are three from yesterday.

The two above are actually the same rock from different angles. On the top photo, I was taken by the crosshatched lines with the vertical lines being indented cracks and the horizontal ones being raised ridges. If you click on the images you will get a larger version that shows it better. I also liked the interplay of the fallen logs, the pine needles and the cones on the ground. I converted the photos to B&W and applied a slight tone to only the shadow areas in Lightroom (37 hue / 7 saturation) for a touch of warmth to the images.

Feel free to share by directing people to this page. Do not repost anything from this site elsewhere without my express permission, a matter of both copyright and common courtesy.

Car Show

Every year during Potsdam's Summer Festival there is a car show in Ives Park. I like old cars and I go most years to see the show which is free. If you have followed my blog for a long time, you have seen my car photos before. I tend to photograph details rather than the whole car. There are two reasons for this. One is purely practical. Between the milling crowds and the fact that most of the cars are parked close together, it is difficult to do justice to a whole car photo. The T-Bird below is an exception. It was parked off by itself and I only had to wait briefly for people to move on and give me a clear shot.

The second reason is that I really enjoy finding beauty in just parts of the cars, details that stand on their own as compositions. The remaining images are all details of cars. At the end is a photo of a tub of hand dyed yarn from the neighboring craft fair.

Enjoy. I sell prints if you see something you want to hang on your wall. Send me an email specifying what size print you want and I'll reply with a price. That applies to all the photos on this blog, not just today's.

Mini Adventure & a Photoshop Tip

I have been goofing off on posting again. I didn't realize until I checked that it had been more than a month.

Yesterday a hiking friend and I engaged in a mini adventure. It was more mini than planned because of the heat. We originally intended to go to the pastel show at VIEW in Old Forge and climb the Rondax fire tower on Bald Mt. on the way home but with the temperature in the 90s and a heat index in the 100s we settled for visits to Buttermilk Falls and Bog River falls instead (no mountain climbing involved). These photos are all from Buttermilk Falls, several are of the small cedar island in mid-river below the falls. None are the fall. I have numerous photos of he falls and the light was not good for photographing the falls. I was intentionally looking at the surrounding area to see what else was of interest the immediate area. Answer? A lot, huge rocks, roots, trees. I especially like this island of cedar trees that somehow survive the spring runoff year after year. You can see where ice flows bash them on the upstream side when the ice goes out in the spring.

The Photoshop tip I want o share involves the use of text in Photoshop. Once upon a time when adding text to an image, in my case a watermark, I could click the spot where I wanted text with the text tool and then right-click to get a dialog that included "Paste" to paste some saved text. Somewhere several versions ago in the updates to Photoshop that changed and a right click instead deleted the text layer I had just created. When I first experienced this Edit>Paste didn't work either but now it does. I know others have had problems with this because I have searched Google for solutions and found lots of frustration over it. The bad news: I have to unlearn my reflex habit of right-clicking to paste text. The good news: Edit>Paste is working again so I don't have to retype the watermark text for every photo in a batch.

Below are the rest of the photos from our outing. Buttermilk Falls is below (South of) Long Lake in the Adirondacks on North Point Rd.

As always, please respect my copyright and do not repost or otherwise use the photos elsewhere without my permission.