Middle Creek Wildlife Area

Fellow photographer, Cynthia Sperko told me to be sure and include Middle Creek Wildlife Area Kleinfeltersville, Pennsylvania on the Lebanon-Lancaster County line as a place to take bird photos during spring migration.  Middle Creek is in Kleinfeltersville, Pennsylvania. According to one website, the snow geese show up the first week in March. They are always an amazing spectacle to watch as thousands of them take off simultaneously.  The state website mentions the beautiful tundra swans  that stop by in the fall in November and in the spring in late February and early March. 


The Visit Lebanon County website mentions nine walking trails. Are We There Yet website  also has a good article about Middle Creek.


The tour road is open from March 1st to mid-September, weather permitting.


It turns out that as we drove through Pennsylvania, we stopped for lunch at Lancaster.  If we'd only known, Cynthia works very near where we stopped. I missed a chance to meet one of my online photography friends.  Sounds like I need to go back into her neck of the woods during fall or spring migration.  Check out  Cynthia's website to see more of her beautiful photography.


Thanks, Cynthia,  for the heads up about Middle Creek!

Cuttalossa Mill

I have had the opportunity to meet some of my online photography friends this trip. We stopped in Doylestown, Pennsylvania to meet Ruth Taylor.  She does beautiful images of her home county, Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  She and her husband also run the BytePhoto.com Photography Contest.

While I was really just planning to meet her and have a short visit, she took me out to Cuttalossa Mill where I got a chance to take some photos of this lovely mill.  What a great way to spend the afternoon!

Minister Creek

We've been seeing some beautiful fall foliage as we go along, but I haven't been finding those ideal photographic compositions. We chose to go through the Allegheny National Forest as we crossed Pennsylvania.  It beautiful, but a little past the peak of color. I was so glad to find Minister Creek, I could hardly wait for the car to stop to hop out, grab the camera, and rush over to the creek.  At first glance, I was concerned, because I could tell it was going to be challenging to get a good camera angle. My first try was looking down on the creek:

I didn't like this camera angle, so I started looking for a way to get down to the creek level.  After finding a spot where I could sit on one rock and work my way down, I found that I had an old grapevine hanging down into my composition as well as a leaning tree.  Luckily I was wearing my river sandals and the water was shallow. I waded in and removed the offending, unattached, dead grapevine and put it on the bank. Taking my next shot, I still wasn't happy with that leaning tree:

 

The water was shallow enough that I could wade in  a little more. My feet and the bottom of my jeans were definitely wet, and my toes started getting cold quickly.  But I wasn't about to rush out of the water until I had done my best to capture this lovely place.

 

Presque Isle State Park, Pennsylvania

When I was walking the Magee Marsh, I ran into several people and we chatted about other birding areas.  One of the recommendations was Presque Isle State Park in Pennsylvania.  I was intrigued because Michigan has a Presque Isle River in the Porcupine Mountains that is a wonderful place. So as we planned our route south and east, we chose to visit Presque Isle State Park.

We arrived late in the afternoon and after looking at the map on our iPad, we chose to drive the perimeter.  Once again, we had found a place with many opportunities. Near the city of Erie, it has many opportunities. We saw joggers and bicyclists. There were opportunities for sailing, canoeing, and kayaking on Lake Erie.  There were both shoreline, pond, and forested areas for birding.  It is the only surf sand beach in Pennsylvania. Because of the many habitats, it contains the greatest number of the state's endangered, threatened and rare species than any other similarly sized area in Pennsylvania.

To my delight, we discovered a lighthouse!  It was late in the day and the sun was obscured by clouds. I knew the lighting wasn't the greatest, but I try to be disciplined in my photography.  So I shot both horizontal and vertical, changed positions, and shot for HDR.

Here is one of the original in the sequence I shot for HDR:

Nik has just come out with new HDR software, HDR Efex Pro and since I do a lot of HDR, I bought it the day it came out. This was my first chance to play with it.  

HDR Efex Pro program is a photoshop plugin. You choose which images and it combines them. There are 33 preset choices as well as manual choices so you have a lot of control as to how your final image will look. Here is my first attempt. I liked the stormy day look and I wanted the sky and clouds to be dark enough that the light from the lighthouse would show. This is how the image emerged from HDR Efex Pro:

 

I usually play with my Topaz plugins: BuzSim and Topaz sharpen. Here was my first attempt and I think I went too far with the BuzSim:

Here is my second attempt using the same HDR conversion - less strong effects, but still enhanced with Topaz BuzSim & Topaz Sharpen. I didn't add the lens flare on this one that made the other light shine more.

 Since I like to play with several choices when I'm doing HDR, I went over to Photomatix and used a different set of images, vertical this time and created this image. Once again I went beyond the Photomatix and used the Topaz BuzSim and Topaz Sharpen for artistic effects.

 Here is a different version on roughly the same original images, using Efex Pro but without adding Topaz.

I don't know yet which of these will be my finished images. I suspect when I get home with my larger calibrated screen and more time, I will revisit these and perhaps start over until I decide which ones I like the best. I suspect that I'll have more than one finished product - a dark brooding look and one with a bluer sky.