But today, oh no. For some weird reason, I got up at 8:30 on my own. Crazy, I know. Nick had hiked Sacagawea Peak yesterday, so I just decided that I would go hike it today since I couldn't go yesterday. After an nice breakfast I loaded up the old day pack with gear and headed out.
The road to get to the trail head is, well, not in the best shape. It's incredibly bumpy, with a couple very rutted spots. It took almost an hour from town to get there, but it was a pretty drive so I wasn't too ruffled about it.
As far as the hike went....it was more of a stroll. I expected it to be, well, difficult? The trail is a couple miles long, literally a couple miles, but it does climb a thousand feet or something. It's really pretty one too, starting off in the forest, going to a windswept saddle above tree line and then finally to the peak. It probably took me a lazy photo taking hour and a half to get to the peak, where my tripod was nearly blown off the mountain due to the high winds.
Since the peak is the highest in the range, or so I'm led to believe, the clouds were probably only a hundred feet above me, or even lower. Sometime they even engulfed the mountain side and everything was lost in a white blur and the roar of the frigid wind. But on the breaks in the clouds, the view was one of the best I've seen all year.
To the south, you look over Bozeman, to the west and north Belgrade and the rest of Gallatin Valley. Over said valley, the clouds were sporadic, with dappled light falling on the valley floor beneath them. Over the mountains to the south, great beams of light found their way to the peaks. Some day I think I'll have to hike the range from the north to south, I think that would be an amazing trek.
I tried my best to capture the scene before me. I thought the best approach might be to take bracketed sequences, and then try to make some HDR's out of them later. So I set my aperture to f16, shutter to 1/30 and ISO to 100. I bracket at +-1.3 EV, so as to try to capture the full tonal range of the scene.
Starting out with the southern part of the range, I did a sweeping 180 panoramic. Using a tripod of course, can't be messing up this one with images that don't aline. When doing a HDR panoramic, it's especially important to shoot with a tripod as there are two process that need images to be aligned correctly.
On to editing, I had two options. Go with a natural look, or do my usual highly edited version that's more of what I saw in my head than was was actually there.
Why not both?
My method for HDR is a three step process. First, I take a group a images in the pano and find and make an HDR preset for it. It's just a matter of fiddling with the sliders until you find something you like, and then saving it as a preset. If I have a whole bunch of images, I'll do a batch process, but as I only have four sequences, I just exported them one by one from Lr and applied the preset.
Next, I combine the HDRs in Ps as a panorama. This usually take a few tries to get the perspective right, as Ps usually does weird things with it. Not realllllly sure why it does, probably serves some purpose.
Finally, I go into Lr and do some final touch editing on the pano. Usually clarity, shadows, vibrance and highlight adjustments. For this one, I darkened the sky with clarity and contrast, and also increased the clarity and shadows in the middle of the image. This was to try to bring out the light beams that were so epic. It sort of worked, but images never really turn out the way you really like them too. But I'm really happy with the HDR version.
For the natural version, it's pretty much the same process, minus Photomatix Pro. In Lr, I took my 0EV images, and just enhanced them a little bit. This meant bringing up the shadows and lowering the highlights to compress the tonal range a bit more. Other than that, I left them pretty much alone. Panorama in Ps next, followed by a Lr retuning.
This was a little more involved. Up with the exposure, shadows, and clarity. Vibrance just a tad. A tad. and down with the highlights a bit. I then did a few little local adjustments to darken the clouds a bit and add more clarity/contrast to the light beam area.
I'm still not sure which image I like more, the natural or the HDR. I think I'm beginning to get to that point where I want more natural looking images, and not so much of the processed ones. They're still awesome, but it's time for a change. But with this one....it's really hard to decide.
HDR
Natural
See you tomorrow!
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