Sepia tone? Sure, why not. The area is super green right now so it felt a little overwhelming and took away from the mill and water. I don’t normally do black & white or sepia, but some old wooden mill seemed like a good candidate for that. After posting this to Facebook, I learned that the great-grandpa of one of my friends owned the mill and that the family still does. The mill is also for sale right now.

Location

Hyde’s Mill is located about 45 minutes west of Madison, WI. It’s a pretty popular location to take photos in Wisconsin due to its old time feeling and proximity to Madison. I’ve seen many shots of it on the photography sites I’m on. It’s free to visit and worth a stop at if you’re in the area. I happened to be visiting Blue Mound State Park and Governor Dodge State Park which were nearby so I made the stop.

Composition

I wanted to get both the mill building with its wheel and the falls in the shot at the same time so I backed up pretty far back to the bridge. Second, I needed some sort of foreground interest in the shot so I found some foliage near the bridge that I included.

Post Processing

Like I mentioned before, the area was full of green foliage that I felt was overwhelming the picture and detracting from what I want people to notice with the picture which is the mill & falls. I don’t normally do black and white or sepia but with this being an old piece of history, it seemed fitting to try out Lightroom’s sepia filters. I also ran the bracketed photos through Photomatix to get some grainy feeling to the wooden mill. I also used focus stacking (which at this point was one of the first times I tried doing that) with the foliage in the foreground and the mill in the background. Finally, I used Google’s Nik Collection and added fake dust and speckles to the photo to give it the feeling of an old photograph.

Software Used

Google Nik Collection

Lightroom

Photomatix

Photoshop

Techniques Used

Focus Stacking

High-Dynamic-Range

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