Bozeman and the Mountains

I went for a walk today up on Peat's Hill with my mom today. I go running up there all the time, and my mom really wanted to see what was up there. We've spent a lot of time driving around (surprise surprise it's Montana), so a walk was really nice. While we were up there, I took a quick panoramic image of the mountains around us.

This time I went with pretty minimal editing so what I usually do. I felt like the scene needed to be represented pretty close to visual reality. That being said, I didn't slack off on time and quality I put in.

My initial exposures were with a polarizer and at ISO100, 135mm lens, f6.3, and 1/200 of a second. ISO100 so there would be low noise, a long lens to get the mountains nice a big, f6.3 to get things pretty sharp while still opening up enough to shoot handheld at 1/200. Since I was doing a panoramic, I did have to really worry about horizontal cropping, just about getting the mountains big enough in the frame. I could have used a longer lens, but then the tree tops of Bozeman would disappear and I liked them in the shot.

I took about 10 images in sequence. It's super important to have 30%-50% overlap in your images, it'll make putting them together so much easier and make everything look nicer.

I used Ps to stitch them together, and then cropped the whole thing to get rid of any white annoying space left behind. I did a few adjustments in Lr with exposure and some color correction. Mostly this was improving the dynamic range and upping the vibrance and vividness of the colors. I also put in a gradient adjustment to the clouds to increase contrast and clarity.

I sent the image over to Ps again, did some highpass sharpening, and made a new copy of all the layers. To this layer I applied a big blur and set it to overlay to make a glow effect. I put this at a very low opacity and painted black over areas I didn't want to "glow."

And that's it. Exported from Lr at that point.

See you tomorrow!