01-16-13 Prairie Home

This is the third photo of the same abandoned farmstead I have posted recently. And having posted this today, I am abandoning the abandoned farm theme. At least for a while.

08-08-12 Ten Trees

Shades of Gray

I was back at Lonesome Lake this morning looking for photo opportunities. As I have already admitted, I am amazed with the fascinating texture of the prairie grass here. And so I took more photos.This is an HDR picture, first processed in the HDR Pro software in Photoshop and then converted to black and white using a NIK set of filters. This is mostly a "real" photo, though if you look at the trees along the upper right part of the photo, they look a little ghostly. Don't ask me why.

Rural Relic

This is another example of an HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo. In fact, there are two photos here - one exposed for the sky and one exposed for the dark side of the old hulk of a car. This photo is fairly realistic, though the rays that are visible in the sky aren't something you would normally see in a photo taken at this time of day. The HDR photo accentuates the contrast in the sky and you see the rays.

The Old Farm - Another View

Ansel Adams is to Yosemite as Shephard is to The Old Farm. I'm no Ansel Adams, of course, but like Adams, I keep returning to the same subject over and over again trying to get the perfect photo. And I'm still looking for it. . .Here are some previous attempts:The Old Farm At SunriseEarly Morning FarmsteadAbandoned

Relic

One bay west of what local sailors call "Hurricane Bay" a structure of some kind is just barely visible above the bluffs, which rise at least 70 feet above Lake Oahe. I have dubbed this bay "House Cove," though I'm sure there is some other name for it.Yesterday, I pulled Wandering Star up to shore and hiked up the bluffs to see what the "house" might be. And, in fact, it was a house - but one that had been vacated years or even decades before. There was evidence of electricity, though it was also clear that this structure had started as a one room timber frame building and then been augmented with two or three more rooms. Could this house have been some kind of outpost for Fort Sully, which used to stand on the opposite shore and which was vacated in 1893?I didn't venture in to the house because I was worried that the floors might not bear my weight. As I stood near what used to be the front porch and looked northeast, I could only imagine what the original inhabitants would have seen long before the Oahe Dam was built. And I could only imagine what kind of rugged, independent, self-reliant people might might have lived in this isolated home.(To get sense of the geography, checked out the photo on Panoramio.)