But let's start off on the good note of shooting. It's been classic spring weather here in Bozeman, rain shower almost every day and very dramatic skies. Today was looking a bit more clear than usual, so I decided to go up to the M trail and take some sunset pictures.
I saw this cool ridge thing when I was driving to the trail head, and it turned out to be right next to the trail up! I climbed up that and perched myself on the around the middle of it. I was on a 3 foot wide piece of rock with 30ft drops on either side. Fun, fun, fun!
When I got there, instead of an epic sunset, I got the most dramatic sky ever. It was incredible and casting amazing lighting on the mountains and valley before me. The tripod came out quickly, and I started taking a series of panoramics right away. I shot at 1/80, f5/6, and ISO100. I mostly was exposing for the sky.
The image tonight is composed of 43 images shot in three rows. The bottom two rows composited really nicely in Ps, but I had to merge the top row separately and then manually fit it in with everything else later. Just a simple layer mask did the trick.
Once I had my nice 124 megapixel panorama (which crashed my laptop 3 times and took me 2 hours to make) I started to actually edit it. The process began by making three copies or looks of it in Lr. I raised the shadows to various degrees as well as the clarity. I then made three more looks of the image with Photomatix. The goal of all this is to have a bunch of different versions I can then composite later in Ps.
Which is exactly what I did next. Using layer masks, I composited the three Lr layers, then did the same with my Photomatix images. I now had two different looks to put together. I threw them in Ps and spent a lot of time with the layer masks to get each part of the images I liked. The sky was more dramatic in the Photomatix images, so I kept more of that image in that area. The ground looked unnatural with the Photomatix images though, but I did like the colors and contrast in it, so I just used that part of the image in a very low opacity.
To complete my edit in Ps, I applied a slight high pass sharpening layer and curves layer that increase the mid tone contrast. I also made a stamp visible layer, blurred it, set it to overlay to make a glow effect, then painted in with a very low opacity the areas I wanted to have more pop and intense color.
This all took me an hour because of a really slow computer. It's really hard to edit when the images don't even open half the time and you have to restart.
Moving to Lr, I played around with colors, tonal range, and split toning. But I wasn't really getting the look I wanted at all. On a whim, I converted the image to b/w and suddenly it was exactly what I wanted. I did like the image in color, but it just wasn't working out so well. In b/w though, the distraction of color disappeared, and you could suddenly see the drama of the landscape. I'm posting both the color and b/w versions because I like them both, but the b/w version is my favorite.
That's all, gotta sleep now. This has been a solid effort since about 6, and it turned out pretty well I think. Definitely one for print.
Btw, I do have prints available if anyone wants to order them...all profits go to camera gear and more trips to amazing outdoor locations!
See you tomorrow!
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