We were out hiking a section of the Bruce Trail which follows the Niagara Escarpment some 900 km from the Niagara River to Tobermory, Ontario. In this instance we were about midway between Vineland and Beamsville, Ontario, just South of the Cave Springs vineyards and camp facility, and came across a nice fissure that provided a view to the woods below the cliff. This section of the trail is heavily fissured, but most are smaller and not deep. The heavy moss covering is typical. The only downside was that the mosquitoes were out in force. Such is life. – JW
Date Taken: 2015-07-16
Tech Details:
Taken using a tripod-mounted Nikon D7100 fitted with a Nikkor 12-24mm lense set to 24mm, ISO100, Aperture priority mode, f/10.0, 1 sec. PP in free Open Source RAWTherapee from Nikon RAW/NEF source file: resize to 9000×6000 pixels, use camera white balance (camera was on Auto WB during image capture), enable Graduated Neutral Density/GND filter tool and adjust to reduce the exposure of the top area to be better balanced with the darker foreground areas, enable shadows-highlights tool and tone down highlights (i.e increase highlights setting value), slightly increase vibrance, slightly increase black level, enable noise reduction, save. PP in free Open Source GIMP: adjust tone curve a slight amount to a classic ‘S’ shape to slightly darken darker areas and brighten the lighter areas while holding the mid-tones, decrease green channel saturation to decrease slight over-saturation of green leaves, duplicate visible result and label the layers (from top to bottom) ‘foreground’ and ‘background’ and then darken the background layer to tone down the bright tree trunks visible in the fissure as well as the bright areas upper right and also the highlighted rocks on the right side of the fissure disregarding the impact on the rest of the image, use a soft-edged eraser tool to remove the bright tree areas in the fissure, the bright spots top right and highlighted rocks from the background layer revealing the better versions from the layer below, make new working layer from visible result, sharpen, save, scale image to 6000×4000 (my normal working size for images preparation for on-line use), add fine black and white frame, add bar and text on left, scale to 1800 wide for posting.
