Pony Express Trail

We went camping on the pony express trail last weekend. On the way to the campground right before the turnoff to the trail, I saw this barn and decided to take the picture on the way back home. I thought of how I would frame it and how it would look as an HDR. The barn was pretty far off the main road and blocked off from getting any closer by barbed wire, so I needed to use the 70-300mm lens at 300mm. I bracketed the picture and thought that I would have a good photo. When I brought it into Photoshop and used the Photomatix plugin to make the HDR, I quickly saw what I had feared from before. The lens that I have, I got from a pawn shop for $50, and at 300mm it does not look good. I think it takes really good macro pictures, but as a telephoto lens it is very weak. The mountains looked very poor and the whole photo didn't look good. Some HDR pictures come together quickly, some I have to work at to make them look decent, and some just look terrible. This one was the latter, so I decided to go the other way and make it look terrible as I could, as the combination of cheap lens and HDR gave the photo a very aged look. So, I guess I have a "good" lens as far as making a photo have a certain look and feel to it, similar to a Holga camera. Holga cameras are very cheep and constructed out of  low quality parts as to keep the price down. They were originally developed in China in the early 80s for the Chinese and were hard to find outside the mainland. They have become popular in recent years for their low quality, soft focus, heavy vignetting, distortions and other "problems" that can look very interesting. I wasn't going for that kind of look, but that's what I got. So as the old saying goes - When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

This photo of the Milky Way is the only one out of these three that isn't heavily photoshoped. I adjusted the contrast and enhanced the color a little bit. I pointed the camera south for a 30 second exposure, ISO 1600 and f2.8 with  the Tamron 17-50 lens @17mm. The orange light to the bottom right corner is the moon light after it had set.