Driving around the area 50 miles or so south of Death Valley, we came upon a abandoned mining area. There was still mining going on (surface deposits) but they had upgraded the facilities. I liked this one better, though. Twenty miles farther north, Ballarat is a mining town that has a single inhabitant. The piano is sitting on the porch, and doesn’t get tuned often.
I know many folks are wanting to enjoy the warm weather and here I am showing photos of snowy mountains. I was going through some older photos, doing some sorting and organizing and found these two images that with the new editing feature in Lightroom that just really made these two pop. So I figured I’d share. The top photo was taken while snowshoeing at Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park. I’ve hiked the Elwha Valley many times and always enjoy looking down on it. The image below is the Sierras from the east near Lone Pine, California.
Supposedly, the pickup truck above was once ‘owned’ by Charles Manson, the cult leader in the late 60’s that was convicted of a number of murders. It sits in Ballarat, a small private holding within Death Valley National Park. Ballarat has a population of one.
Below is a building that is in Ballarat. If you want to call it a building. I thought it made a nice jumble, though.
I took this photo a couple years ago (it’s got a lot more snow this year). In the middle distance is the top of Mt Whitney. I was camped in the Lone Pine (California) Campground. This is a 15 second exposure at ISO 3200 taken with my Nikon D810. Below the three stars of Orion’s Belt, the bright star is Rigel. Just above Orion, the yellowish star is Betelgeuse. To the right the bright star is Aldebaran. The small group farther right is the Pleiades.
What’s new with this photo is that I used Lightroom’s new AI noise reduction to minimize the noise associated with the higher ISO and longer exposure. Below see the before and after image … zoomed in 300% so you can see the difference easier. (At 300%, you also see a little of star motion.) You see a lot of the color dots are gone … that was mostly noise. Unfortunately, a few were likely very faint stars. But mostly, I wanted to do a little show-and-tell. You can see it is smoother. Some images will benefit from this new feature more than others. Sorry, but you can’t use it on a JPG image (yet) …
This is taken on the road up the the Bristlecone Pine area of the White Mountains in California, above the town of Big Pine. (The dead tree is not a bristlecone.) This viewpoint is at about 8000 feet and the view here is looking south.