Extremes

My first assignment this year was to help in inspections of property line maintenance in southern Mississippi. My two-week stint landed me in Wiggins, MS, home of baseball's Dean brothers, Dizzy and Daffy. There was sure a lot of new stuff to see there and a camera was an essential part of our inspections.

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Here's a pic of a large interesting tree that somehow grew this way. I have to imagine that a hurricane did this many decades ago. This area was squarely in the path of Hurricane Katrina and damage was seen almost everywhere I went.

This particular type of magnolia has such HUGE leaves. I didn't see any large examples of this species, though. The biodiversity here is tremendous, with such good growing conditions.

Upon returning to Reno, I was greeted with a cool and stormy scene in the Sierra Nevada. It was so overcast and cloudy that the original picture was dull and bland. I used a new technique I saw in a camera magazine to enhance the shot. I made two layers, one with the shadows properly corrected and one with the sky adjusted. It's an interesting technique to erase from the top layer what you don't want, revealing the adjusted layer below. You can see that the shadows came out nice but, the lighter highlights aren't quite right. All and all, it definitely improved the original picture and this technique will be useful in "fixing" pictures that weren't exposed properly.

The next picture was at the 8500 foot Carson Pass on California highway 88. Red Lake was still frozen over in late April. The change in climates from Mississippi to California was almost as extreme as the change in cultures.

This is where I started my next assignment. The Sacramento Amtrak station still has that look of yesteryear, when trains were the only way to travel for long distances. I needed to pick up my work truck and riding the train seemed to be the best way to get to extreme northern California.