Barn Along I-26

Another HDR shot of a barn with clouds. This barn is along I-26 just north of the Gray exit.

I stopped along the interstate - while observing all safety rules of course - and snapped the three photos of the bracket between cars on the road.

Pretty sweet clouds, eh? I'm always amazed at how cool the clouds look after being HDR'd.

The Long Way Home

The weather was so nice on the way home from mom's on Sunday I decided to come back to J'boro through Damascus to Backbone Rock to Elizabethton. It's a great ride through country with some great old barns and other stuff that should make some great pictures.

What I hadn't anticipated was how many motorcycles would be out riding that route. Oh my gosh, literally hundreds of bikes, loud bikes, fast bikes, slow bikes, old folks on bikes, geez. The numbers of bikes on the road really mucked up my picture taking trip cause every wide spot along the 50+ miles of road that I wanted to stop at was occupied, oh bother.

I was able to get stopped at and snag the above faux-HDR picture of this neat old barn with baskets and whatnot nailed to the outside. I wish there was a better angle to get a better shot, but, the no trespassing signs and herd of bikes precluded working around to a better angle. All that stuff on the outside of the barn made some really great texture.

The next faux-HDR picture is a church that looks like only the roof was built, no walls, just dormers on a roof .... weird. The rock front of the church also has some excellent texture and color.

Spring is trying hard to get here

It's been a while since I published any pictures, so, here's a couple I've taken this week.

The first is some cherry trees in full bloom just up the street from Mahoneys. What caught my eye was the green grass with the brown mulch against the pink and white of the cherry blossoms.

The other picture is an old house that sits in the field across from the soccer practice fields at Providence Academy. This old house has caught my eye several times over the winter. The tree behind the house is starting to leaf out, which makes a nice reddish-brown backdrop.

Cades Cove and Spruce Flats Falls

It rained and stormed the whole morning before we got to the Cades Cove loop, so the wildlife in the park was still taking cover ... at least that's my story as to why we saw just a few turkey and a few whitetail deer.

But the barns were cool and I like barns, old ones, new ones, doesn't matter. There's just something about the shape of a barn. Simplistic utiliy. The first one is at Cable Mill.

The next one is at the Tipton Farm. It's a cantilevered design, I've never seen one afore. It makes sense for creating shade, and some protection from the weather, but it looks top-heavy, kind of like a big wooden mushroom, or maybe like someone has stolen the bottom half ... regardless, it's a cool looking barn.





We also hiked to a waterfall on the way out of Cades Cove named Spruce Flats Falls. It was a pretty average hike, about a mile each way, a bit steep at each end, and the falls were just ok, not that different from most of the other falls I've seen.

What was cool is that this was the first time I've taken a picture with my new handy-dandy ND8 neutral density filter installed.

It was about 2:00PM so the light was really bad for waterfall picture taking, but this filter did a respectible job of getting a 10 second exposure in bright light.