After a dark and stormy night, it’s been a hot and humid morning … so I put together a small gallery of ferns, berries, flowers, vines, and ‘shrooms beating the heat in the summer shade.
Click the first image to begin the slideshow and enjoy the shade; stay cool!
Once upon a time, I was driving my camera around in a rental car near Peru, New York, when I came across this bright red building, just off the roadside in a field all by itself. As you can see from the photos, storms were moving in, and I had just enough time to snap a dozen pictures before it started raining. It wasn’t until later that I realized I hadn’t made note of the building’s location (and the camera I had at the time didn’t have GPS capabilities), and on subsequent trips, I couldn’t find it. I assumed it was a one-room school, but didn’t know if the “School Zone” sign near the front door meant it it really was a one-room school, or someone had just nailed a sign to the wall of an old storage shed.
I recently learned that it is, indeed, a one-room school and was registered with the National Register of Historic Places as the Lyon Street School in 2013. The school is located at the intersection of Lyons Road and Rock Road, about five miles from Peru. The building is considered an example of late American Victorian architecture, with an estimated construction date of 1880 and an in-service date through the 1930s. The National Register of Historic Places Registration Form (pdf) includes a great description of the school’s construction, has a couple of photos of the interior, and reveals a lot about how the building was used. It reads, in part:
The school is of light wood frame construction and is clad with wood clapboard siding attached with wire nails; the siding shows signs of weathering and age-related wear. The foundation is random laid field stone which is in fair condition….
The gabled roof with overhanging eaves is covered with corrugated metal which is rusted throughout and buckling in areas. The metal was laid over the remnants of an earlier wood shingle roof. An open, hip-roofed belfry sits on the ridge at the northern end; the bell is accounted for but not presently on site…. The six-horizontal-panel door has a transom light over it, and there is a round window in the gable field that has been boarded over. All openings are framed by flat trim which was also employed under the cornice and on the corner boards….
A bank of windows is centered on each side elevation of the building, directly under the eaves. Each bank consists of five windows; the three central units are square-shaped and have nine-pane fixed sash, while the outer windows are full size and are fitted with nine-over-nine double hung sash. The two lower sash on the east elevation have been damaged and replaced by larger sash which is ill fitting. A small coal hatch, now in very poor condition, is located on the west elevation, north of the windows and approximately five feet off the ground.
The interior of the school is largely given over to one large room, the classroom. Upon entering the building from the north facade, there is a small, roughly finished room to the right. This room was used to store coal for the stove and corresponds with the hatch on the west elevation…. To the left is a finished wall that makes up one side of a cloak room, which is accessed from the classroom. Continuing through the hall there is another framed entry that opens into the classroom. The walls and ceiling of the classroom and cloak room are finished in bead-board which has been painted over and partially stripped in areas. On the walls it runs vertically up to a chair rail that encircles the room at the height of the bottom of the larger windows; above that it runs horizontally. The window casings are formed of grooved millwork, with rosettes in the corners. At the south end of the classroom there are two voids, presumably where blackboards once hung….
In the same pdf document, there is also a short summary of the historical significance of one-room schools:
At the start of the 20th century there were over 200,000 one-room schools nationwide. Of those, it is likely that fewer than 10,000 presently remain. While some have been restored, many others exist in varying states of decay or alteration. The Lyon Street School is fortunately among those that remain largely intact and is a representative example of part of New York and American history that is rapidly fading.
The Lyon Street School is one of the few still standing in northern New York that is in good enough condition to allow for repairs. In The Peru Gazette, a local community newspaper, there are several articles describing ongoing reconstruction of the building, certainly enabled by its registration as a historic site, and some photos of the restoration of the belfry, the transom, and the front door.
My photos are nearly a decade old, hiding away in my archive folders, but I always wanted to do something with them and learn more about the building. The images below are largely unprocessed, though I did try to enhance some of the detail, especially detail that is reflected in the building’s description I quoted above. Maybe these pictures are now part of its history.
Select the first image to see larger versions in a slideshow; and, as always, thanks for reading and taking a look!
I was browsing through some old photos on my computer the other day, and came across this one that I took about a half-block from Oakland Cemetery a few years ago. The building shown in the photo has since been demolished, but I remembered taking the shot because I liked the color of the boards covering the window and the suggestion of similar colors in the siding. I never did anything with the photo, just kept it, but thought it would be fun to see what I could come up with by experimenting some more with Adobe Lightroom and with the Nik Collection that I downloaded last week. Here is the original, unedited photo:
My first step was to use the Transform panel in Lightroom to shift the photo to a perpendicular perspective, so that it appears you are now looking straight toward the window rather than at the angle shown in the original. The transformation also resulted in a segmenting the photo almost equally into three distinct elements: the siding to the left, the window in the center, and the leaves coming in from the right side and partially covering the window.
At this point, in Lightroom, I made some exposure adjustments to brighten the image overall, to deepen the contrast, and to increase color saturation on the colors in the siding and on the window. The focus on the leaves was not great, so I adjusted sharpness, clarity, and noise reduction to try and repair some of that, but it didn’t really help. Even though the siding and window boards are clear with reasonably good detail, the fact that the leaves were originally out of focus is still very apparent. But sometimes you gotta work with what you’ve got, and see where you end out when you end out there.
I used this image to become more familiar with different capabilities in the Nik Collection filters, but didn’t keep close track of each incremental adjustment. However, the key changes that got me to the result shown below were these:
With these adjustments done, I returned to Lightroom and added saturation to purple and magenta colors for the siding and blue for the door, to emphasize three individual color panels in the final image. Here’s where I stopped, with this substantially different representation of the original photo. Click the image to see a larger version.
To see the progression as a slideshow from the original unedited image to the stylized version shown above, click on the first photo below:
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
The four photos I have experimented with in this post are from Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta. Here I take two passes at each of the original photos, the first to make initial improvements using Adobe Lightroom, and the second to have my first experience with a set of plugins that can be used to apply creative effects to images, described below.
In Lightroom, I emphasized the angel statue by working on the background first: reducing exposure, clarity, and sharpness using graduated filters; and reducing saturation in some of the background colors. I then added a little light and a bit of sharpening to the angel faces using a radial filter. Removing spots followed that and was quite a challenge in these photos; but by zooming into sections of each image, I could eventually differentiate spots of debris from texture in the statue’s plaster, enabling me to remove those that created bumpy shadows or were a distraction to my eye. Lightroom does an awesome job with spot removal, and even though it took a while, the effort did seem to improve the photos while retaining most of the detailed texture of the statue — without damaging the structural smoothness of the angel, her wings, or her gown. As the last step, I adjusted overall sharpness then removed a final few spots that only popped out at the higher sharpness level. I applied similar effects to the single photo of the lilies; though it was the foreground that I de-emphasized since the flowers are set toward the back.
Click the first image to begin a slideshow showing the original, unprocessed images followed by the Lightroom edits described above.
I’ve been wanting to learn more about the Nik Collection 2018 plugins for Lightroom and Photoshop for a while now, ever since I read about them here: Bluebrightly Wanderings and Observations — so yesterday I watched these two YouTube videos about the software. The first one provides an introduction to the seven tools in the collection, and the second a more detailed overview and demonstration of the individual plugins:
Introduction to the Nik Collection
There are an enormous number of functions in the collection, and I’ve barely scratched at the surface, but the two videos gave me an idea of the workflow for using it and enough information to get me started, so I downloaded a 30-day trial of the plugins from the DxO website, here: Download the New Nik Collection by DxO.
Given their relative simplicity, the angel statue photos seemed like good candidates for this experiment. To produce the after-results in the slideshow below, I applied several filters to one of the images, including a soft focus filter, a darkening filter, and a whitening filter. One of the powerful features of this software is that you can apply the filters to the entire image, then pick “control points” to reduce or eliminate the filter effects selectively from parts of the photo. In this case, I applied the soft focus filter to the whole image, then removed it from the angel’s face. The effect, of course, should be to draw your eye to the face as the intended focal point of the image, while further de-emphasizing the background yet still keeping it as part of the character of the photo. Once I was satisfied with one photo, I used the plugin’s “save recipe” function — which saves all the filters and settings — then applied the recipe to the other photos in this set.
Select the first image below to compare the images as edited in Lightroom with the effects I applied using the Nik Collection plugins:
The effects, of course, create a completely different kind of image, and the creative options provided by the collection seem to be pretty close to endless. I only used three or four of about 60 effects available … in only one of the seven plugins. Select the image below to see larger versions of the end result (or, the end result for now until I learn more!)
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
