In the mountains the sun sets really really early. We were in shadow by about 4pm. But it was pretty warm out, so it wasn't terrible to be outside. The falls were really cool, part of them were frozen, and some were flowing. I didn't realize it at first, but we were standing on the frozen river under the falls! Pretty cool.
I got a photo of the falls just before the last of the light faded, but the last of the light wasn't that great. Next time I'll get up there sooner and get something with more light.
On our way back, I saw the setting sun hitting the clouds above the mountains, with the frozen lake in the foreground. I quickly pulled off the road and took some pictures. I bracketed them, so that I would get the sky and the shadows in the trees. One exposure can't capture everything, so multiple ones at different densities are needed.
I shot at f/11, ISO100 and 1/6s. The important adjustments here were the aperture for sharpness, and the low ISO to get low noise. The shutter speed followed, I just used what ever would give a correct exposure.
I also shot with a polarizer, to darken the sky. I wish I had a red filter, that would have really darkened the sky. A colored filter brightens it's color, and darkens its compliment. So with a blue sky, it would be darkened.
In editing, I first darkened the sky in the dark exposure just to get as much detail out of it as possible. Next, I opened the picture in Ps and created a bunch of luminosity mask selections. The first one I chose was a selection of the highlights, which I then applied to the dark layer. This brought the sky and other over exposed areas back into detail. I had to touch up the areas close to the mountains, to add a bit of glow to the mountain tops.
Next, I selected the shadow areas, and then applied them to a curved layer that brightened them up a little bit. Not too much, but enough to not let them fall into black.
Finally, I made another selection of the highlights, and used it brighten up the snow a little bit. The snow was a little dark for my taste.
I tried to make the photo as realistic to life as I could. I think it's pretty close, maybe a little bit more contrasty. To have it exactly life like though would be rather uninteresting sometimes, so you have to add a little flare.
I finished up in Lr with sharpening and noise reduction. As with yesterday's photo, I adjusted the masking to only include the trees and clouds, since I didn't want the blue sky to have detail. I guess it would be grey sky though, since it's a black and white photo.
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