Not Just Horsing Around

This is probably way off-topic, but I have been working on a group of photographs from the 1970s taken in Reading and the surrounding Berks County in Pennsylvania. A few years ago I had an exhibition at Goggleworks in Reading called "RDG 76" (the bicentennial year) that was reasonably well received. I am expanding the original parameters considerably and reprocessing most everything with a much better understanding of Photoshop's capabilities and some new tools and plug-ins. A large part of this is using Akvid's Retoucher to remove dust spots and scratches from the scans of the 50-year-old negatives.

Occasionally I get carried away. You might not think it, but these two images are from the same scan and processed identically with six layers: the pasture, the pasture's shading, the horses, the fence, the trees, and the sky. My thought was that the original blown-out sky was a problem and I used Neo's sky replacement tool and voila! Sky. After staring at the print for a few days I questioned whether the new sky was distracting and turned off that layer resulting in what you see.

Even more off-topic, this is the upper horse pasture at Camp Conrad Weiser. In the late 1960s through at least the mid-1970s (maybe still, but I haven't been there in a long time) about half of their horses were wintered there. In 1966 I spent several weeks digging postholes for that fence. There were a lot of rocks.