Photos

This grand old Arcadia Valley, Missouri house is really an impressive structure. It was built somewhere around the time of the American Civil War, 1860 or so, and still stands in the town of Ironton, Missouri, not very far from Elephant Rocks State Park. It is not a Bed & Breakfast, nor an antique store or apparently any other sort of business, at least not as far as I could find out so far. I wouldn't mind seeing the inside - if I ever get to I will be sure to bring my camera!

On this particular morning, the light fell so nicely for about three hours, I was able to capture several beautiful scenes in excellent, warm morning light, pretty much at my leisure. The white porch and railing on this pinkish-red brick house just seemed to glow in this morning light. I only had a UV filter on the camera - no polarizer - the sky was that deep, the sunshine that warm. I had to tone down the highlights in this shot, otherwise all you could really see was that white porch and railing.

So here's my dilemma - I took several shots, of course, all hand held with the Sigma 10-20mm super-wide lens. Naturally, as is to be expected with that lens, they all came out with a certain degree of distortion. I've left this one as shot as far as that distortion. As I said before, I used the highlight tool to tone down the bright white, and I also de-saturated the school bus in the lower right hand corner - it had also picked up the glow from that beautiful sunrise. Some requisite sharpening after shrinking and that's about it as far as post processing. I have another one, too, in which I performed all the same post-processing to, in addition to removing the distortion in DxO. I will put that one in the workshop. I tend to correct for the distortion quite often, because it's usually not the effect I was going for. However, I thought this particular shot was interesting with the distortion, so I uploaded it as my main image today. Which do you prefer?