hiking trail

I took this picture from a hiking trail off of the Blue Ridge Highway in NC. I'm very glad I didn't have to make that entire climb by foot. Just look at how those trees on the right fall off. That's very steep terrain. It's so hard to imagine the settlers back in the 1800s traversing these mountains on foot and, god forbid, with wagons. I went up the Cumberland Gap a few years ago and the entire time I was driving up I was thinking about that. Yikes.

Blue Ridge Highway

These two pictures were taken from the same spot a few seconds apart. I was on the Blue Ridge Parkway when I took the pictures, a little north of Asheville, NC.

They illustrate how just a little zooming can subtly change the feel of a picture. In the picture above there's the slight marring of the jet contrail as well as the framing effect of the tree branch in the upper left and the tall pines on the right. The picture below has a somewhat flat appearance due to the mountains creating a line across the midpoint of the picture.

The location was quite pretty but framing the original picture well, or cropping later on can make a big difference in the "feel" of a shot.

wildflowers and lichen

...the wildflowers are above and the lichen below--just like in that parking lot off of the Blue Ridge Highway last weekend...