The forcast calls for highs in the 50s with temperatures above freezing and rain until Friday morning. This covers Newport, Gatlinburg and the higher elevations, so I expect the snow and ice to be completely gone by the weekend. It will turn a liite colder over the weekend (wind chill of 3 deg Saturday morning at Newfound Gap), but should be pleseant for the most part. I have not made it out shooting this week so far. I’ve been caught up in running errands etc. I would like to get down to Douglas lake for some shooting before the rain sets in but I don’t think I’ll make it. I went by there yesterday and the water level is way lower than I’ve seen it before. The new lakefront villas being built right now are about 500-600 yds from the lake. All of the old grain silos are back on dry land again.

I did one of my composite canvas’s printed. It is a 24″x44″ composite along the Little River upstream from Tremont. It is a 3 shot composite photomerge. It looks pretty good although I will have to play with it a little, with the range from light sky to dark water and shadows in the foreground, the sky in the leaves backlight by the sky in the corners are not quite where I want them. I shot this as a 9 shot composite, a 3 shot photomerge with each of the 3 shots being a 3 shot HDR image. So far I have not found that HDR image program that gives me the results I’m looking for. I don’t like Photoshop’s CS3 HDR processor, and I have done a little playing around with the Photomatix trial edition, but I may need a little more practice with it to get the results I looking for. I am also going to try the Lightroom Enfuse plugin this week. If I can get decent results with that then I would be a happy camper. It would help workflow a lot. Here is the shot as is now.

This is the shot after using LR/Enfuse to do the HDR portion. Not to bad for my first attempt. I ran the shots through the HDR process, then imported the results back into lightroom, developed the center shot to where I wanted it, then pasted those develop settings onto the left and right side images so that they would not be out of balance when merged, then merged the images in photoshop, imported the final image back into lightroom and did a little tuning. This looks much better on canvas, I went with a lighter feel and less saturation which makes for an image that really pulls you in. The fun part though is that as you look through the image you can find a lot of interesting little details due to the size of the print. This one is going to start the limited edition series. Unfortunately uploading as a jpg for the web does not do it justice.