Thursday morning we decided to get out as a family before the day’s heat hit the mid-90’s and head to Historic Smithville Park. Smithville was an industrial site, founded in 1776 and expanded over the course of a century before it was shut down. There are some remnants of the factory town in the park, as well as the ruins of the factory complex. There’s also a mansion tour and museum, as well as a butterfly garden. I’ve yet to visit these, but when the pandemic passes I’m looking forward to a visit ¹. It’s very nice site to visit.

I took my wide angle lens with me for this walk, which I’ve been doing a great deal of this Summer. In this case this was deliberate, as I had a couple of shots I knew I’d need the wider field of view to capture well. Bump rode in the stroller on the way out, but then walked with us the entire way back and through the industrial village. He probably walked over a mile on his own power in bad heat. The little guy is a trooper!

My favorite image is below, capturing the bridge I’d had in mind when I decided to shoot with my wide angle lens. In this particular photo I had a horrible violet flare taking up the center of the frame. In my EVF this showed up as a haze, so I was looking forward to developing it, but in On1 it took on the odd hue ². I’m sure there’s a way I can fix this in post if I tried hard enough, but I opted for a different approach. I created a mask which isolated the ugly flare, and with that mask I used a color adjustment filter to desaturate the colors ³. Because the tones were fine in the effected areas the resulting desaturated area gives the passage over the bridge an etherial feel, crossing into a desaturated realm as you move toward the sunlight. It’s not what I was hoping for, but I really appreciate how it looks!

For the rest of my images from the walk, check out my Smugmug gallery.