Stormy Mountains

It was stormy this afternoon. It almost rained on me coming home from work, but amazingly it cleared up in the evening. I was driving on the outskirts of Bozeman, and happened to look over at the Bridgers. What a view. The rain earlier in the day had cleared the air, so there was almost no haze at all to mask the Bridgers. The contrast on the mountains was epic, so flatness or blandness to them at all. You could almost see the individual trees on the mountains. To make it better, they were dappled with light from the dramatic clouds looming over the peaks.

I only with I only remembered my polarizer. With a polarizer, I could have darkened the sky and but out even more of the haze (not that there was much). As it were without a polarizer, the sky stayed pretty light and blended in with the clouds more than I would have liked. But with editing I fixed that to some degree, so it worked out in the end. It just would have been much nicer to be able to do the effect in camera rather than in post. Any edit you do in post just degrades the photo, so doing what ever you can optically helps a lot.

For shooting, I was at f11, 1/200, and ISO100. I wanted everything to do be very sharp, so I shot at f11. The sharpest part of a lens is in the middle of the aperture range, even though you get more depth of field with smaller apertures. The rest of the settings just followed to get correct exposure.

To get the whole range in the view, I could either do one wide frame and crop it, or I could take a series and stitch them. I knew I wanted to do a panoramic, but I did not just wanted to crop a wide photo. I didn't have time to set up my tripod, so I just zoomed in a bit and hoped I was shooting level. If you don't use a tripod when taking a pano, you tend to float up or down, and your pano get skewed.

Which is what happened. But that was an easy fix by just warping the image a bit in Ps to make it level again. Cheating technically and it distorts the photo, but not enough to really notice.

But before I did the pano, I did my editing in Lr. For each photo, I applied the same edits. B/w conversion first off, as well as upping the clarity and whites a bit as well. Shadows then went up to preserve shadows details. The point of these edits was to enhance the contrast and make the image more dramatic and true to the way I remember seeing it. As I've said before, the point of photography sometimes is to show the world how you see something, no always just how it looked in reality. If that means making it untrue to life, but true to yourself, then you should do it.

To correct and make the effect a polarizer would do, I lowered the luminosity of all the blue spectrum colors. So blue, violet, purple, etc. This darkened the sky a lot, and make the clouds stand out more. Just right.

Heres the non polarized version and the final version so you can see the difference it makes.

See you tomorrow!