April Outside in Hocking Hills

Love this place in the Spring! We were lucky enough to get rain Thursday overnight, and the streams and waterfalls in Hocking Hills were gorgeous. This is Cedar Falls. We took the easy way down, since the bridge on the rough but beautiful path was taken out by a falling tree. As you can see by the photo, where I had to lay on the rocks to use the boulders to cover that ugly downed tree, falling trees are fairly common. The soil's really thin, and no matter how burly the roots, wind and water will have their way.

The upper falls at Old Man's Cave. Beautiful old stone bridge.

More falls, leading down to the bowl below Old Man's Cave.

 

A beautiful view from the Conkle's Hollow rim trail. Took this a few minutes before I realized that the drop, straight down, is about 250 ft. And the trail is roughly three inches wide....

Rock House, a very cool cave, and very full of hikers on a Saturday.

Another great trip to Hocking Hills!

 

April Outside: Zoar

Did a little side trip to Zoar before the photo workshop in Hocking Hills. Had lunch at a German restaurant, and took this photo of the footbridge over the Tusc and the remnants of the Ohio and Erie Canal.

Hard to believe the Army Corp of Engineers is considering letting Zoar drown instead of repairing the levee or reducing the height of the dam. Worth a side trip on your way down 77 to Amish country.

 

April Outside: Sunday

Pretty cheerful day today - started with a mocha, then lunch with my brothers, a visit to Mom, shooting at St. Hubert's, a hike at Holden, and dinner with Chuck. Just about perfect!

Spotted this guy washing his dinner in a stream.

And two bird watchers pointed out this bittern in Buttonbush Bog at Holden.

 

April Outside: Photowalk

Saturday's Photowalk was to the Bath Rd. Heronry and the Wagner Daffodil Trail. This is one of the nesting trees - very close to the road, which is unusual for birds as shy as herons.

 

April Project: Outdoors

Th cold and snow are lingering entirely too long, so to help vanquish the winter blues, I'm doing a daily outdoor photo, maybe SLR, maybe iPhone. Just a little bit of outdoor cheerfulness as spring takes over northeastern Ohio.

Sunset from the main road in my neighborhood, edited in Snapseed - a very nice photo editing app for the iPad.

This is my first post from Blogsy, another iPad app, and one of the few compatible with Blogger. What will it look like?

Here goes...

 

Farm, Holmes County Ohio

Just one from yesterday's Amish country tour with Lisa. This is the after, with a texture by Kim Klassen (http://www.kimklassencafe.com/) and a couple of adjustment layers:

(double click to see this full size)

As you can see by the before, the sky was the sad grey which so often plagues us in Ohio. But it was great weather for shopping, and I came home tired and happy - can't complain about that!

We stopped at Lehman's Hardware (of course!), Eastwood Furniture (love them, good prices on lovely furniture), Village Gift Barn (a really heinous name for a very nice shop) , Country Gatherings, and Breitenbach Winery. Lehman's is a fun place to shop, all sorts of ol-timey stuff useful when the electricity goes out (or for the zombie apocalypse), plus they have a ton of unusual cookie cutters and candy making supplies. Do not, if you treasure your stomach, eat at their cafe. Unless you're starving and the aforementioned zombie apocalypse has begun. It's not up to par with the rest of the store.

Country Gathering has some sweet garden art, and is definitely worth a visit. We had a very late lunch at Breitenbach Winery, which I would definitely recommend. It would also be a nice place for early morning photography - unusual architectural, wine making equipment, and the occasional llama would make interesting subjects.

Enough for now.

November 19, 2012

Zoar Vignettes, the Video Version

Here's a link to the Zoar Village Vignettes video hosted on Vimeo. It's definitely an improvement over the embedded version in the previous post.

https://vimeo.com/45373788

My favorites:

Pretty place, definitely worth a visit.

Zoar Village Vignettes

A short slide show on Zoar Village - it'd be great to go back when it's cooler and in better light. Zoar is loaded with rustic vignettes and really old, beautiful buildings. Even with the temperature in the low 90's there were a few sturdy souls out taking the tour.

This is the second slide show I've made in Lightroom. The title and end slides were done in Photoshop Elements. I'm not quite sure what resolution to work with yet. Tried 300x 400-ish, and 1080P. The first pixilated and the second was too big to load. Blogger doesn't seem to having any guidelines for file size or format, at least that I could find after a cursory look.

The resolution on this looks pretty awful, even though it was saved at 720P. Any thoughts you might have on making it looking better would be appreciated. In the meantime, view small!