3 Early Light on the Mountain

[AlanL]

Some nice morning pastels on the slopes of Mt. St. Helens from a sunrise last week. This is a 3 shot panorama from the tele lens on my Mavic 3.



Comments and Critiques always welcome.

 

[GFields]

Awesome photo Alan

 

[twickers14]

What more can I say but-perfect!

 

[GrayHornet]

Wow!

 

[JimSteadman]

You need to find some wall space for that one! Beautifully done!

 

[AlanL]

You need to find some wall space for that one! Beautifully done!

Thanks! This was one of the better sunrises I have managed to capture with this mountain and it's a view from directly over my driveway so I can shoot it a lot.

 

[DaveS]

Super! Looks like a pastel painting. Great job.

 

[Cymruflyer]

Some nice morning pastels on the slopes of Mt. St. Helens from a sunrise last week. This is a 3 shot panorama from the tele lens on my Mavic 3.

View attachment 160539

Comments and Critiques always welcome.

It's a beauty that you took there. Lovely composition and framing with those bottom trees. Please forgive me, but I tweaked your photo a bit and include it here for you to peruse. Apologies if I took too much liberty.

 

[AlanL]

It's a beauty that you took there. Lovely composition and framing with those bottom trees. Please forgive me, but I tweaked your photo a bit and include it here for you to peruse. Apologies if I took too much libertyView attachment 160617.

Thanks - a bit more colorful and contrasty than what I saw when I shot it to be sure but an interesting take on the scene.

I am often told that I am on the conservative side when it comes to pushing my imagery in post processing but I tend towards presenting a scene as faithfully realistic whenever possible.

 

[Cymruflyer]

Thanks - a bit more colorful and contrasty than what I saw when I shot it to be sure but an interesting take on the scene.

I am often told that I am on the conservative side when it comes to pushing my imagery in post processing but I tend towards presenting a scene as faithfully realistic whenever possible.

I completely understand, however you need to remember that your eye has far, far greater contrast resolution than any camera that we currently know about. For example, in your photo, you saw the trees at the bottom as mostly dark to black. If you saw them with your eyes, I would say that you could see the details and colours in those trees, however, your camera did not register that as a basic image.

You would need to tweak things a bit to get on a screen, what your eyes actually could see. As for colours, well yes, some people like an added boost of colour and others like it muted or dulled down. I did tweak the colour a bit to give it more punch, which could, of course, be toned back down. What I wanted to do though, was to show the colour and detail in the trees that framed the bottom of your image, to give it a bit more depth. I appreciate you not jumping all over me for taking some liberty here, thanks.

 

[AlanL]

I completely understand, however you need to remember that your eye has far, far greater contrast resolution than any camera that we currently know about. For example, in your photo, you saw the trees at the bottom as mostly dark to black. If you saw them with your eyes, I would say that you could see the details and colours in those trees, however, your camera did not register that as a basic image.

You would need to tweak things a bit to get on a screen, what your eyes actually could see. As for colours, well yes, some people like an added boost of colour and others like it muted or dulled down. I did tweak the colour a bit to give it more punch, which could, of course, be toned back down. What I wanted to do though, was to show the colour and detail in the trees that framed the bottom of your image, to give it a bit more depth. I appreciate you not jumping all over me for taking some liberty here, thanks.

I am quite well aware of the sensor shortcomings when it comes to depicting the full dynamic range in a scene compared to what our eyes can see. I have been actively shooting digital for over 20 years now and have posted several thousand images in photo forums prior to playing around with drones.

The image at the top is actually tweaked quite a bit to begin with between crops and the healing brush to remove rooftops and the top of a shopping center. I did bring out more details in the foreground trees from the RAW original after running the RAW shots through DxO PureRAW to allow for better details in the shadows and to clean up focus and lens distortions. I used TK8 to isolate the pinks and magentas and selectively add more saturation with some contrast tweaks to the skies for more details in the clouds. I left the foreground a bit dark intentionally to draw the viewer's eyes to the mountain instead of being distracted down in front.

The given is that every photographer has their own preferences for what a final image should look like and I don't see anything wrong with that. Give 5 photographers the same RAW images and you will get 5 different final images and I am fine with that. That's what makes photography fun

As for your edits - I invited comments and critiques in my post and you gave me some feedback. Thanks!

 

[Cymruflyer]

Oh wow, I would have never guessed there were houses and a shopping centre in that image. Well done, and I see I don't need to explain dynamic range to you, that's good. People who don't know much about it often way overdo it, so it looks gaudy. Look forward to seeing more of your work.

 

[AlanL]

I should have pointed out that this was shot from directly over my driveway and not in some chunk of forest land. I find that if I drop down just low enough to keep St. Helens above the trees it minimizes the number of rooftops I have to clean up in post. Hard to get low enough to hide the facade in front of the grocery store but between the healing brush and not recovering all of the shadow areas it does a good job of disguising it in the scene

 

[Jug's Life]

The layers is what always gets me.