Living among us giants, faeries still do exist. But, it is the rare few that see them, or at least where and how they live in these modern times... I don't know if any live here anymore as this old house seems quite abandoned. I wonder if they had to move because of all the development that has taken place around them over the last 6 or 7 decades. Sad actually, to think that once there lived the most magical of creatures and we as human beings have forced them out of their habitats...
Okay, not really, this was just me getting creative and adding to my artistic editing. You see, the image below is the original 30 second exposure that I took a few days ago. Note the skew horizon, the very dark foreground and all round poor detail.
While I was looking at this in my photo viewer, ACDSee Pro 2, I wondered what it would look like with lifted shadows and straightened horizon, it brought an intriguing look and feel to it and I wondered about the its potential. Hmmm... PhotoShop!
Okay, so I never did very much in PhotoShop besides a pinch more lighting and a colour boost to give it a bit more life... but I felt it had a void, something was missing, it seemed interestingly boring...
So, now I got creative. First thing I did was go into my archives of photos taken, I rememberd having the perfect picture of an old house that would work, cut and trimmed it to fit. I then had the task of making sure that the old house fits the colour tone and mood of the rest of the image, so some time later, I was happy. Gave the over-all image a complete boost of colour and contrasted brightness. Threw in another image layer, a high-contrast B&W version which I filtered down to be barely noticeable but to add some more shadow.
Once I'd gotten it to look a little more intersting I decided to give it a more interesting and mystical look... by adding another layer, but this time with a gaussian blur (set to 12.5% blur) and filtered that layer over the others. It, of course, made the foreground a bit too blurry so I erased some (with a 25% eraser) just to add some sharpness back. The end result is quite impressive if I do say so myself.
Let's take a look at that one again...



In between all the trees, roads and little of anything else, I spotted one of many old neglected houses...
They too had little roads leading into the forests.
The guest lodge I stayed at had a pretty cool pool.
Just outside Nelspruit, the sky began to clear up.
Taken amongst the hills and valleys of Mpumalanga.
This Giraffe and Zebra were spotted along the side of the road, behind fencing of course on a game farm just outside Nelsruit.
Up the hills and back into the contry side.



Misty morning in Moolman, a tiny place not even spotted on a map, but 15 minutes from Piet Retief.








Nature's sculpturing is phenominal.