So when I got out there, and it was just lame yellow clouds, it was sad. But then I looked behind me and saw the unearthly purple glow that was going on in the valley. Quickly, I drove up to the top of this hill that overlooks the valley and the Bridgers. I wasn't really sure if I was going to be able to capture what I was seeing with a camera...it would probably turn out to be too flat or something.
But I tried any way. After figuring out my exposure, which was about 1/4s at f/5.6 and ISO250, I set up my tripod and started a panoramic. As I've said before, making sure the tripod is level to make compositing easier. Then I just shot my frames and headed home.
I started off with some little editing in Lr to the raws. I brightened things up a little bit, as well as increasing contrast. With the fading light, things got a little flat for my liking. Then I just made a panorama in Ps with them, and moved it back over to Lr. I did do more cropping than I usually do for panoramas on this one because the edges of the frame didn't really need to be shown. The little foot hills north and south of town aren't too interesting, and they would just make the pano too long.
In Lr, I did some, well, dramatic edits. The highlights went all the way down, but then I raised the hills up quite a bit. This gave me more highlight detail while also getting bright whites. I did the reverse with the darker tones, but this accomplished the same thing. More details in the shadows. I also brightened things up by .4 of a stop, which does mean the image was initially under exposed. Maybe I need to stop trusting my internal light meter, or get better at factoring in parts of scene. If there's too many bright objects, the meter will underexpose, too many dark ones and it'll over expose. But this scene is fairly even, at least I thought so...weird.
Anyway, I'm going to go eat something and catch some zzzz..
See you tomorrow!
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