Golden Gully, Hill End - Rainy Day Photography

Although I had been to Hill End before, I had not heard of Golden Gully till this trip. Just out of Hill End, close to Tambaroora, Golden Gully is a small ravine where gold was discovered in the 19850s. You can easily climb down from the main road to the base of the ravine and wander along the small stream. When we were there is was bitterly cold and raining. Even so we met two characters who were busy gold panning in the creek.
The gully is probably 30 feet deep and features a large natural arch and multiple diggings into the ravine sides. Not the sort of place you'd want to get caught in during a flash flood.
As you can see from this shot, the light was poor and the photo results very dull.

This is a triple exposure put together as an HDR shot  using Photomatix Pro and sharpened.
Some hue and saturation adjustments have been made to bring out the colours.

More work is required.  In this frame I used the Burn brush set to Midtones to darken both the edges of the frame as well as the darker parts of the image.  Doing this not only brought out the colour in the ravine walls but it also served to highlight the tracks into the gully.  Burning-in the shadows and Dodging the highlights has the effect of increasing local contrast and is a very effective way to bring out the tones in an otherwise dull-looking image.