Lange’s Mill

During a recent getaway trip to Central Texas, we stopped at Lange’s Mill along Threadgill Creek. It’s a beautiful old grist mill. For being built in 1849, it looks to be in pretty good shape. They don’t build them like that anymore. At first glance, the siting of the mill relative to the creek appears strange as it above and set back from Threadgill Creek. However, the water wheel was on the left side of the mill (hidden from view behind the trees in front) powered by a stream from the hill behind the mill. It would have been fun to explore inside the mill but it is on private property and well posted as such.

The Composition

The vegetation and the constraints of no trespassing limit the possible compositions. As a result, I went with the view from the other side of the creek looking across the road. Fortunately, it was a pleasing composition. Additionally, I framed the composition in-camera to have the road come up from the bottom-left at a diagonal to help lead the viewer’s eye to the subject. By cropping it slightly in post-processing I fine-tuned the diagonal line placement.

The Shot

My gear and settings were:

• Canon 5D Mk III, Canon EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM Lens
• 1/400 seconds at f/11, ISO 500, 65mm focal length, handheld

I might have been able to use a slower shutter speed to allow a lower ISO. However, I chose those settings deliberately to be conservative. It was breezy and I wanted to be sure to prevent motion blur in the trees and was not too concerned with noise at this ISO setting.

Post-Processing

My post-processing started in Adobe Lightroom with some basic adjustments. Taking the image into Photoshop I applied some sharpening, shadow and highlights adjustment along with vibrance adjustments. I made these adjustments using a Photoshop Action I got from Gavin Hardcastle’s Fototripper website some years ago. Hardcastle is a landscape photographer. So, as you might expect, this action is designed for landscape images. I find that the action has too much yellow for my taste so I lower the yellow saturation after using the action.

Using Nik Silver Efex I converted the image to black and white using the Low Key 1 preset. Recognizing the importance of managing color when making black and white images I used the yellow color filter in Silver Efex to lighten the dark green foliage to make it stand out more. I also tweaked brightness and contrast a bit.

With the image back in Photoshop I did some non-destructive dodging and burning in dark and light areas. My finishing steps included apply a warming filter to create a sepia toning complementing old time feeling of Langes’ Mill. To finish I made the crop I mentioned earlier and then added a slight vignette.

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