Saturday, February 20, 2010

Kennedy Mine


Kennedy Mine , originally uploaded by mhall209.

This is some of what is left of the head frame of the Kennedy Mine, one of the deepest gold mines in the world. It is in Jackson, Ca, the town just north of where I live. The mine was closed in 1942 because of the war effort. (A concept I still don't understand. I would think a nation at war would need all the gold it can get!) You can read more about the mine here.

The point of this photograph is that it is one of my first HDR attempts. I went out on a photo expedition this morning to some of the nearby gold rush towns in my area. It was a drizzly, rainy morning. Not rain, but not clear either. This structure is quite a distance from where I was standing. You can get a sense of scale from the telephone pole in the center of the photo. I knew the exposure was going to be tricky because of the foggy haze, so I made about five different exposures, hoping that I could do something with them. Recent lessons had me with my tripod, and I used a delay for the shutter release just to be safe.

Once home I opened all the images in Photoshop CS4 and ran the HDR script. I think the results are pretty good. The image is not as sharp as I would want in a perfect world, but the tonal range is far better than any of the individual images I had taken. I think I will be doing a lot more of these HDR images.

2 comments:

  1. Very nice. I keep running into HDR references. When I get my new camera, I will have to give it a try. Always new stuff to learn.

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  2. Thanks for pointing out the telephone pole, I think I would have missed that and not realized the size of the mine. I like the diagonal lines on both sides. Nice shot!

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