Looking Out from Lover's Leap in Rock City
Lover’s Leap offers a great lookout spot from Lookout Mountain at Rock City in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as several people gather on the lookout to check out the view. And with Valentine’s Day just around the corner (hint: it’s Sunday), I hope none of you lovers are thinking about leaping.
This scene was from our trip to Chattanooga last year with Jaylin’s school class. I took several photos on that trip, but I ended up not posting all that many of them. That was because this trip was the first part of what would become the Burnsland World Tour, and I evidently got busy posting photos from Bangkok, the Bahamas, and Florida, and I sort of forgot about these Chattanooga photos. Oops. But I got to thinking about the trip again after going to a meeting for this year’s class trip (which Laura and I aren’t going on, although Jaylin is), and I found several unposted gems in the lot. Such as this view.
Maybe the title is just a little misleading, because while it says that this is the view from Lover’s Leap, that big rock ledge there is in fact the actual Lover’s Leap, although you can also see much of the same view from this location. But I thought a photo with Lover’s Leap actually in the photo is much more interesting than just what you would see if you were standing on Lover’s Leap, so here you go.
By the way, this is a similar view to one of my all-time favorite photos, along with the corresponding photo of Laura in front of it. So maybe after liking those two photos as much as I do, I subconsciously thought that none of my other Chattanooga photos would be as good as those, so I just stopped looking. Maybe sometimes it is best to take a break and get away from things for a while, and then they might look more interesting again after some time away. I think that is what happened here. And this photo has a very different look from those other two, as you can read about in the “About the Photo” section down below.
Let all creation rejoice before the Lord, for he comes, he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his faithfulness. - Psalm 96:13
About the Photo
It is interesting to see how my tastes in photo processing change over time, because this photo ended up looking quite different than those earlier Rock City photos, although they do have their similarities. Those earlier ones were created using Photomatix to produce an HDR photo from a single Raw photo. This one is also an HDR from a single Raw file, but it was created using different exposures from that original Raw file and merged manually instead of having the computer make a guess about it.
Once I had all of that done, the photo looked a little too “clean,” for lack of a better word. Maybe I used too much noise reduction or something, but for whatever reason, it looked just a little too smooth. So I added some texture to the photo to give it a slightly more rough look. Behind the scenes tip: for that texture, I took a photo using my phone of the office carpet and used it as a very light overlay, which gave it just the right texture for me. It may not be very noticeable to anyone else, but it made a difference in my eyes. It’s the little things sometimes.
Photo: A single Raw exposure, processed in Photoshop. Read more about photography tips, photo software, camera gear, and more at Steve’s Photography Tips.
Camera: Olympus OM-D E-M10
Lens: Olympus M.Zukio 25mm f1.8
Date: April 2, 2015
Location: Rock City, Chattanooga, Tennessee
