Mabry Mill on the Blue Ridge Pkwy

Maybry Mill on Blue Ridge Pkwy, Sept. 15, 2005
Mabry Mill is located near mile marker 175 on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Visitors can walk around and check out the way an old mill works. There is also a restaraunt and bathrooms nearby. In this photograph, we are looking north. The mill is on the east side of the road.
I already posted this photograph on the website back in September, but since that time, I have gone back to the original file and re-saved the image at 72 ppi (see below for explanation). My rate of posting new pictures has slowed this week because I have been so busy reading and learning about how work with digital images. My goal is not to make fance composite images in which I superimpose such things as a tiger, whale, and rainbow up in the sky. My goal is simply to take the "raw" image from the camera and make small adjustments so that it provides a more accurate representation of the actual scene.
The most common adustments that I make include 1) increasing the contrast (to make the photograph less even-toned grayish and drab) and 2) adjusting the color balance a little to make sure the greens look about the right shade of green and the pinks look the right shade of pink, etc. I often do this work using Nikon Capture, and then resave the copy in the Nikon raw image format (NEF).
Finally, sometimes there is a speck of dust appears somewhere on the digital image because dust literally sticks to the sensor inside the camera (the sensor is like the "film") and blocks the light when the shot is taken. A dust speck usually appears as a gray or black spot or blotch. If the dust speck happens to be located in a blue part of the sky or in some other area where the color is rather uniform, then the defect is very noticable and must be removed. If this is the case, I will remove the defect it by "covering" with a "healing brush" tool in Photoshop. The healing brush acts like a paint brush, and covers the defect with an appropriate color to match that part of the image.
I don't plan to turn this website into a technical how-to type of place. I am just giving you an idea of what I have been doing these days and why so few new photos have been appearing. By doing this groundwork now, I will be able to do a better job posting images in the future. I plan to start posting images pretty regularly again sometime this week.