The Alton Mill is a late 19th century industrial stone complex located on the bank of Shaw’s Creek in the heart of the village of Alton in the Town of Caledon and us just five minutes south of Orangeville. The Alton Mill was built by pioneering settlers of Alton over 120 years ago and the 3.4 hectare site comprises of the main two-storey stone mill building and three-storey water tower, a brick chimney stack, a stone livery, the remains of the stone wool warehouse, and the adjacent mill pond and dam. For the full history of the Alton Mill click here.

Standing over the falls on the banks of the Credit River, the Alton Mill has been fully restored and brought back to life as a creative arts centre. It is now home to more than 30 artists in their studios, plus galleries, a heritage museum, café and unique retail shops. The Alton Mills Complex has been recognized for its heritage value by the Town of Caledon, By-law number 2004-201. For more info on the Alton Mill please see their website.

The above photo was take back in early April, I processed the original raw image with the Photomatix software to create an HDR image to help bring out the colors better, to see the original pictures untouched click here.

This photo taken back on September 26th in the Palgrave conservation area provides a last glimpse of summer. There is only a small hint of changing colours and it just shows you how quickly it can turn from very green to the colours of fall. This is an HDR photo processed in Photomatix from a single raw file from my camera, click here to see the original photo.

Here is the Northern Leopard Frog up close and personal, this macro shot was taken with my zoom lens from further away. I used the software Photomatix to tonemap the picture which makes an HDR(High dynamic range imaging) photo and brings out the vibrant color on this Leopard Frog. This particular guy was a pretty big one, larger than most you might see on your lawn. For more about Leopard Frog’s please see my previous post about them.

This small little woodpecker has been in my backyard for quite a while but I haven’t been able to get a good picture of him until now. I am not entirely sure but I think it is either a female Downy Woodpecker or a female Hairy Woodpecker, if you know please let me know. I have seen these little guys all over Caledon and if it wasn’t for the wood pecking you might easily mistake it for chickadee or some other small little bird. Picture was taken with my Olympus 70-300mm zoom lens and was then cleaned up and enhanced with the program Photomatix. Below is a small Animated GIF I made of it pecking at the white birch tree.

I’ve noticed a lot of crows in the Caledon area the last couple weeks, they are ugly birds but I thought I’d take a picture of one anyways. Apparently Ontario’s crow population has been on the rise for the past decade and several communities have battled with the birds. In Chatham, Ontario for instance, 160,000 birds dropped in without warning in 1999. When noisemakers, bright lights and other scare tactics failed to work, the town was divided over whether officials should begin shooting large numbers of crows. In the end, a company was commissioned to frighten the pests away with birds of prey, like owls and falcons.

The above main photo is actually an HDR (High dynamic range imaging) image I created with a program called Photomatix. HDR imaging normally consists of taking several pictures of the exact same frame with each frame moving from a dark exposure to a light exposure, then combining the pictures. HDR photos can also be created from single shots using the original Raw image file. This allows for a photo in which the darkest and lightest parts of the picture have detail, where a single photo of normal exposure won’t have detail in these areas.

When processing a HDR image you will usually Tone map the image, tone mapping is a technique used in image processing and computer graphics to map a set of colours to another; often to approximate the appearance of high dynamic range images in media with a more limited dynamic range. Print-outs, CRT or LCD monitors, and projectors all have a limited dynamic range which is inadequate to reproduce the full range of light intensities present in natural scenes. Essentially, tone mapping addresses the problem of strong contrast reduction from the scene values (radiance) to the displayable range while preserving the image details and color appearance important to appreciate the original scene content. Not everyone like this technique. Some people think it is not real or it makes a shot look too fake, how you create a HDR image and tone map it is largely a subjective thing as there is many different styles and approaches to it that can be made. The image to the right is the original unedited image so you can see the difference.