Remember that road trip…

Life sure gets busy, sometimes.  Between the Thanksgiving holiday, work, cardiac rehab, and my laptop needing to completely reinstall Windows, and yeah, well… things like blog posts have had to wait.  Which is too bad, because I’ve really had stuff to say and photos to show.  I really want to post another shot of the Perry Sinclair gas station from this past summer, but the laptop is still in sparse mode and I haven’t reinstalled my Adobe products yet.

So while I was hoping to be a little more random and creative, instead I am featuring a photo from our road trip in late October.  I had been purposely saving this one, as the scene was one of my favorites during the trip.  Yet again, Missy and I are cruising down the highway when we spot this and come to an almost screeching halt, back up, and check it out.  I’m sure the guy in the Corvette I had just passed was wondering what I was doing, but I digress.

We pull up onto this road, which was really more of a glorified driveway than a road.  There’s a house up on the right then the road curves to the left to another house.  As we park, a guy from the first house leaves in his pick-up, stops, chats for a second, then goes on his way.  All the while his dog followed his truck down the driveway and out onto the main highway, then running at full speed keeping up with the truck for about 1/4 of a mile.  Then he stops, and heads back to us across a field.  Missy and I watched all this with great amusement.

The dog was very friendly, but also just a bit cautious.  He allowed us to pet him, but wasn’t going to get too friendly.  He wasn’t rolling on his back for a belly rub, that’s for sure.  After about 10 minutes he retreated and watched us from a short distance, so I set up and started shooting.

This scene is a classic example of how a photo can draw you in, almost as if you’re walking down the road.  It has several aspects that lend to the pleasing composition… the road, the shadows, the autumn colors, the blue sky in the background, it’s all there.

One “rule” was broken, though.  Technically, this wasn’t shot at the right time of day.  It was a little too close to mid-day, so I bracketed some shots and ran it through HDR to help balance out the shadows and the highlights.

This was taken south of Bedford, Iowa, just a mile or so north of the Missouri state line.  I’d like to go back.  There’s a true round barn in Bedford that we visited, but the roof has safety issues so it’s closed until they can raise some money to fix it.  We did meet some wonderful older ladies who volunteered to run the county museum.  It was really all quite interesting.