Baking the Mountains

I went over to Reuben's dad's house tonight to catch the sunset on the mountains. Reuben had texted me a picture of the mountains in the morning, which was really sweet, so I thought I definitely needed to get out there for the evening. Good choice to do so.

When we first got out there, it was very beautiful. The sun was just going down, and the mountains were beginning the light show. Took a few pictures, but then waited a few more minutes for the colors to really start. It was pretty good at the time, but it's always brightest before the dark as they say.

Waiting definitely paid off. The colors at around 4:15 were just freaking amazing. Mt. Baker was just lit up orange and the sky was a beautiful shades of purple and orange. I tried a couple different framings, but I settled on doing a long and skinny panoramic. Not too skinny, but three shots long that would really capture the mountains. There was a little bit of the islands in the foreground, lit up a deep deep shade or orange.

I shot with my 70-300 lens at 300mm. That lens isn't very sharp wide open, so I had to shoot at f/8. To get a good shutter speed for handheld (we were on a very steep roof), I needed 1/250. The stabilization is really good on that lens, but I don't dare go any slower than that. With those settings, I needed to use and ISO of 400.

The first thing I did in post was to make the panorama in Ps. After I had cropped it down, I proceed to adjust the tonal ranges with a curves adjustment. I pulled the whites up quite a bit, as well as the shadows just a tad. This gave the contrast a lot more punch, especially in the highlights. I didn't pull much out of the shadows, they were about perfect as is. I wish there was less haze, but with it being so cold and with no clouds, I really doubt there would ever be any better conditions.

Next, I used the stamp tool to remove a tree in the left edge of the photo. It was actually incredibly easy, all I had to do was pick spots with constant tones and paint away. Took about 5 minutes, max. Photo shot really is an all powerful tool. The one spot that gave me a bit of pause was the mountains. I had to pick spots to clone that would blend with the spot I was healing. This really just meant matching angles and shadows, which is much easier than it sounds.

I didn't do any editing in Lr, all in Ps. Enjoy!

See you tomorrow!