Green River Reservoir, More on Lightroom

Dead Tree (Green River Reservoir, VT)

Dead Tree II (Green River Reservoir, VT)
The photos above have been taken on Green River Reservoir last fall. We had the luck of hitting peak foliage season there with perfect weather for the last three years now. Again, this is my "old postcard" look achieved with Topaz "Glow".

I have to write a bit more about Lightroom: I am really positively surprised by that tool. I still find the Library/Development module a bit more clunky than the Apple Aperture solution, but once you get used to it, working with it is just as easy. So far, I have been reading just one book on the tool, but there are countless videos on YouTube that not only explain the mechanics, but also give great advice on workflow. You can find some cool plugins (like this LR/Blog for posting photos to a blog). The only one I am missing from the Aperture world is "Border FX". Of course, you can do all these things with Photoshop, but I prefer simple, intuitive solutions.

Burlington Waterfront

OK. It is December, but winter is nowhere to be found this year. While going through my photos from the past year, I stumbled across this January scene taken next to the Burlington Fishing Pier. Now THIS is winter! It was a Sunday afternoon, so the photo was taken against the sun. I took three exposures back then and just now developed them with my new HDR tool, Aurora HDR (by macphun and Trey Ratcliff). I am getting a hang of it and will probably do most of my HDR work with this one from now on...

For this particular scene, I selected a rather dreamy preset and went from there.