POTD 77 of 365

Everything lined up today for a shot I've been itching to take for months. I was wearing jeans and sneakers, for a short trek through some woods, the light was OK (not great, unfortunately), there was no snow on the ground, and my back isn't giving me much grief. Because I knew all but the the light and my back would cooperate, and I suspected those would be OK too, I tossed the good camera in my bag this morning, and I took this on the way home from work today.

There's a feature in Dorrance, right off the 81 exit, that's locally known as "The Standing Fire". It's an old chimney, sitting in the middle of the woods, and, like all odd things, you'll hear that it's haunted, and you can either:

A. Smell smoke
or
B. Hear voices

I don't put much (read: any) stock in any of that, but, since a company started felling most of the trees in the area surrounding the chimney, I've been a little concerned about a not-well-documented piece of local history, and wanted to grab a shot.



This shot had a ton of work done to it. To start, it's three exposures, merged using Picturenaut, and then brought into PS for some dodging and burning.

Instead of the D&B tools, which I've found to be miserable to correct if it goes wrong, I added a D/B layer by creating a 50% gray layer in "Overlay" mode.

Burned areas got painted black, with a large brush at 8% opacity. Dodged areas got painted white with the same brush.

I bumped up the vibrancy a bit (and, may have been a bit ham-fisted there), spun it down to a JPG, and there it is, after a crop to remove some of the negative space at the top of the shot.

Pretty happy with this one.