Speed River Trail off Niska Road

I had a holiday today – woo-boo – so Laurie and I went hiking on a stretch of trail we have never been on, despite living in Guelph for 20 years! Beautiful – and great photographic potential. In fact, I decided on this trail because I had seen the work of other photographers along the trail. It did not disappoint. Here are two from today. What started as a thrilling foggy day began to turn blah, but still had enough light for a couple of photographs…here they are.

Both are shot with a AF-D Micro-Nikkor ƒ2.8 on a tripod-mounted Nikon D800E and were post-capture processed in Lightroom 4. The Milkweed suffered from too much background at ƒ16, so it was aligned in Photoshop with the same shot at ƒ5.6 to provide a soft background, then the ƒ16 background was laboriously erased. As Lightroom is my workhorse and does just about everything except cook meals, this is my first instance of using Photoshop this year.