A Walk along the River

We are currently staying at the Hillsborough River State Park just northeast of Tampa.  This is our 3rd Florida State Park on this trip and each one has been distinct.  This is the largest park we have been in and has lots of trails and even canoe rental.  You definitely get the feeling that it is a popular spot for the locals since it has a large swimming pool and numerous picnic areas.

We have a four day reservation leaving on Thursday and we were hoping we might be able to extend it, but they are booked ahead and any non reservable sites available are not big enough for us.  Florida State Parks are very popular in the  winter and if you have your heart set on a specific park at a specific time it is advisable to book ahead.  We have reservations at Oleno State Park that we will be heading to next week but have 3 days to fill in between so we may decide to stop at the Escapees park in Bushnell.
 

Judy reminded me that it was time to put up a new header picture, so we decided to go for a walk and see if  we could come up with some new images for our blog.  We chose the Rapids Trail and were not disappointed.  The new header picture on our blog is a panorama of the Hillsborough River.  It was made by stitching 4 images together in Adobe Photoshop CS5, and further refinement in Adobe Lightroom.

I also thought I would include a few more images from our walk.  I refer to these as study prints since I may or may not do further work on them.  Some of these are blended images from 3 to 4 separate exposures.  I use several programs to accomplish this, depending on the subject matter.
 

It takes about 20 minutes for each image to get to the point you see here and then if I really like an image I would probably work another hour or so on it.  Hope you enjoy them.

Until later.