Mark's Photo Travels

About a month ago, I made my annual trek up to Henderson County, North Carolina to buy some apples and do a bit of exploring along the way. This year, much like my recent trip to Renno , I decided to revisit some of the places I've been to before to see what, if anything, has changed. Staton's Grocery Staton's Grocery is located just south of Tuxedo on N.C. 225 (Old U.S. 25) near  the intersection with Green River Road . The store was built in 1920 by Ulysses Staton who also operated the store until his death. His wife, Effie, then operated the store until her death in 1981. The building later used as an antiques store, but is currently unoccupied. My first visit here was in 2012 , and looks much the same except the Dr. Pepper sign once above the left window is now gone. Tuxedo Community Store Continuing up N.C. 225, the old Tuxedo Community Store building  sits across the street  from where the Tuxedo's textile mill once stood (now the site of Tuxedo Park)...

Usually when one hikes up the strenuous  Falls Creek Trail near River Falls in northern Greenville County it's to see Falls Creek Falls , a must visit waterfall in Jones Gap State Park. I've been there a number of times, and it's always a pleasure to visit, except for the difficulty making the climb. This time I came to hike Falls Creek Trail to visit a number of rarely visited smaller waterfalls, the last one being Chute Falls, all reachable by spur paths from the main trail. The parking area, just beyond Palmetto Bible Camp, has room for only two or three cars, but a limited amount of space is available off one side the road for a few more cars. Before heading up the trail, I had to visit the dam for Trammel Lake. While not a waterfall, the stone dam does make for a good photo when the water is flowing nicely. The trail by kiosk is one of the easiest parts of the trail. The entire trail, except near Falls Creek Falls, once was a logging road. This is the...

Usually when I head out to take photos of old, historic places, I already have a list of targets I've researched ahead of time because I like to be prepared. This time I only had one target in mind, the ruins of Bell's Store in the ghost town of Renno, while other targets would be decided along the way. I recently bought Luminar 2018 as an alternative to Lightroom 5 which I've been using for a few years now. I strongly prefer owning software over renting, making paying a monthly fee to keep Lightroom working not an option for me. I tried ON1 Raw 2018.5, but found the interface a bit clunky and unintuitive for my taste. So for now, I'm using Lightroom 5 for its library functionality and Luminar 2018 to process most of my photos. I've also chosen a few of my older photos to process with Luminar 2018, one of which happened to be  a February 2012 photo of Bell's Store in the ghost town of Renno in Laurens County. I decided to post the newly processed edit of...