I grew up close to the Covered Bridges of Madison County near Des Moines, Iowa. Growing up I really didn’t appreciate them till after I’ve been away for quite a few years. Anyway, back in Iowa over Thanksgiving, we traveled to see the Bridges of Madison County.

These are perfect for using HDR photography. The image directly below is of the Holliwell Covered Bridge, and was made by combining 9 individual shots using exposure bracketing. This bridge was built in 1880 and is the longest covered bridge in Madison County coming in at 122 feet. The Holliwell bridge was featured in the movie Bridges of Madison County. It was renovated in 1995 at a cost of $225,000. Enjoy!

This next image below is another HDR image, but this one is just using 5 images. The name of this one is the Hogback Covered Bridge and was built in 1884. The length is 97 feet and it was renovated in 1992 for $118,810.

This last one for today is a 5-image HDR taken inside the Hogback Covered Bridge. I really liked how the holes is the right side of the bridge shined light like a laser on the bridge floor and left side of the covered bridge. This light really wasn’t noticeable much when I took the shots. What do you think?

It was a great morning to walk around the Collierville Square (Collierville, TN) and take a few HDR images. The first one below is of the little cabin on the square. It is all decked out for Christmas. We’ll have to go one night to see the lights on. You can see more images from this morning at: http://www.PhotoDean.com/collierville.

The next image below is of the front of a locomotive. Used the 70-200 zoom on a tripod. 5 RAW photos merged into Photomatix, then a little clean up in Photoshop.

The last one I’ll put up for now is of the gigantic wheels of the locomotive. This time I used the 12-24 zoom. As above, I had 5 RAW images merged into Photomatix, then a little tweaking in Photoshop.

What you say? A car on a boat? Actually, the boat is the Freedom of the Seas and the car was on the Promenade. It’s a RAW image that I did a pseudo HDR processing by taking into Photomatix and tone mapped. It really brought out the shadow detail.

The processing also brought out the grunge look. Some like it and some don’t. What do you think? The bottom image is the untouched original.

As we were leaving Port Canaveral during our June 2009 cruise, I was standing out on the balcony (with camera, of course) and saw an interesting view of the Brevard County Sheriff’s boat. I won’t give all the details here, other than to say it was shot in RAW, then brought into Photoshop, used the Topaz Adjust filters, and ended up with this.