Mark's Photo Travels

A few weeks ago, I went out to Rocky Bottom to visit the Eastatoe Creek Heritage Preserve . I had wanted to find a path down to the creek so I could explore and see if I could some waterfalls. I didn't find a path, even after I had been studying old aerial maps to find logging roads, and I wanted to try one more time. Once again I parked in the Foothills Trail parking access area. I expected the parking access to empty like last time, but to my surprise it wasn't. I hiked down the road to where a satellite view showed what may have been some old logging roads, but I found nothing but forest. So I went back to my car and parked near the gate to the trailhead for the Eastatoe Creek Heritage Preserve. These photos are from my most recent visit: I found a spot where I thought an old logging road may have once branched off from the trail. If there was a logging road, it didn't go far. I did find an old rusting mattress box spring and some old cans of J ohnson's...

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...