An Atlanta Tour

Yesterday I had a doctors appointment on the other side of Atlanta which for me is a little over seventy miles.  The doctors have requested that I not drive in Atlanta due to my disabilities and my medications, so Tom was driving.  I can drive around Griffin; it being smaller and my being familiar with the area, but driving in or through Atlanta is an entirely different proposition.  Any way it was raining at times very hard I was getting drowsy; I was still in a great deal of pain from my fall of a couple of weeks ago and I was in need of a diversion.  The book I brought with me just wasn't doing the job.  Tom had the radio on talk radio (driver controls the radio) and normally Neal Boortz is interesting and creates some interesting conversations between Tom and I, but yesterday Mr. Boortz was really in a mood, he even admitted it on the show.  So I searched for another diversion and since I almost always have a camera with me; I decided to try taking pictures from in the car.  The camera that I usually use is being cleaned and repaired, but I did have my starter point and shoot camera with me.  Perfect for just playing around with.  I set it for Auto and started snapping away.  I was amazed at the photos that I got and I had fun at home just playing around with my editing and creating moods with my editing.

 

This is one of the first pictures I took and because of the mist, it had such an old fashioned look that I decided to make it look like an old-fashioned postcard.  I don't know what buildings these are or when they where built but they just seemed to fit into the scene.  

 All the photos were taken on I-75 or Ga 400 and in this case the MARTA rail is just on the right.  The gate you see open leads onto the MARTA tracks and seems just a little dangerous to me.  I wonder if I should report it.  I really liked this composition especially the buildings disappearing into the clouds, except in the original everything was gray and misty except for the trees in the foreground.  They were bright green.  I tried every edit I could think of even just going down the lists of editing options on some of my programs.  Some I kept some I deleted, aren't modern electronics just so cool  until I had the photo almost where I wanted it and then I saw  a button I had never pushed before and WOW just what I wanted.  It looks like a night scene but still has enough contrast to look nice.  This key was to make it into a negative and normally I don't like doing that in my editing, but I really like the way it looks here.  NOTE: Just because a program has the same name on it's edit doesn't mean it will look the same on all programs, such was the case here.

 On the north side of Atlanta sits two buildings the King and the Queen.  This is the King, with his square crown- the Queen has a rounded crown.  It refused to rain on the King although you can see the reflection of a raindrop from my windshield.  I was absolutely amazed at this photo and how clear it is.  We were on the highway going at a more than adequate speed, I was using a camera that the manufacturer considers obsolete and will not update the software so I can download from the camera, I have to download from the memory card and yet the photo is clear enough to see the railings on the porches and the lights on the inside of the building.  Amazing.

 On the way back I got a view of Lenox Square Mall and as you can see there was so much water on the windshield that that is what the camera focused on.  I just thought that it made for a neat shot all by itself so I only did basic editing.  Another thing that amazed me was the fact that the windshield wipers showed up on so few photos, even though they were going the whole time.

My ghostly picture

On the way back this building, which is the same one as on the first photo, was wrapped in clouds.  It's not often that I have really looked at a building like that.  It had an other-worldly look to it, so to add to that I added a reflection.  I think maybe this turned out to be my favorite.  There is one thing that I learn from photography and I keep learning it over and over is that there is beauty to be found in everything even in what in past days I would have considered a rainy, wet, NASTY day. 

I hope you enjoyed my tour of Atlanta.