Mark's Photo Travels

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...

The Eva Russel Chandler Heritage Preserve is a heritage preserve located off Persimmon Ridge Road near Cleveland, SC. The heritage preserve is home to certain rare plants, the ruins of a homestead, and a waterfall, but what really brings me here this visit is the prospect of continuing my search for the ruins of moonshine stills. Slickum Creek, also called Persimmon Branch, flows through the preserve down through Wildcat Wayside Park, then into the South Saluda River. I had already searched Slickum Creek up to one waterfall short of Heritage Falls , and now I'm back to explore further upstream. I parked out of the way of the red gate: then walked around the gate down the trail part of which was once an old dirt road. I started at the same waterfall where I left off last time. I bushwacked my way up to the base of Heritage Falls where I already knew some ruins were located. I actually found more ruins than I expected. I found this barrel and a still furnace I alr...