First visit to Brown County State Park

On Oct. 14, I posted some pictures from a visit to charming Nashville, Ind. The excursion stuck on my mind so positively, I returned to Nashville the following weekend not only to tour more of the shops there, but more importantly, to brave the stampede headed to one of Indiana's most popular autumn tourist attractions, Brown County State Park.

It was my first visit to the park; I'd been to Nashville and its shops at least eight or so times, but I'd never ventured to the park, which is on the town's southern fringe.

This is an expansive park, as the map will show if you follow the link (scroll down to the bottom). So I knew I wouldn't get to see much of it. I brought along my circular polarizing filter to use on my Tamron 18-270mm f/3.5-6.3 Di PZD VD lens and Canon 7D. So I decided to find an area near water and concentrate on that.

The park has two lakes -- Ogle and Strahl -- and each is surrounded by a pedestrian trail. Ogle is the larger lake and closer to the entrance, so that's where I ended up. Most of the images in this post were taken on that journey around the lake.

The trail's interesting stairs infrastructure was a subject of several of the images, you'll notice. As has been the case with most of my landscapes these days, I bracketed my shots for exposure to allow for treatment in high-dynamic range (HDR) software during post-processing. Most of these images are HDR renderings. A few -- virtually all of the ones with people in them -- are single frame shots.

The images are not presented in chronological order, although the last two shots were taken on the departure from the lake and park, including a pull-over to get that overlook shot into the park. One other note: I present two "looks" of a similar scene of a water reflection shot, one taken zoomed back, the other zoomed in. I couldn't decide which I liked better.

I revisited Nashville on the same trip and took more pictures there. I haven't begun to process those, so a post featuring those photos is a ways off.

As usual, to see a larger, more details version of an image, click on the picture. A gallery of the full shoot can be found at my SmugMug site.