One aspect I like about digital photography is that I have had a lot of opportunities to shoot in amazing places. But often little time to edit. Winter is a good time to edit for those photographers who don’t chase the sun to the South and so, on a rainy day, I find myself happily at the computer, looking back to sunny days in Washington State in September.
This three day weekend started with instruction in the grand lodge because of too much rain and fog outside. The mountain was right there, but we couldn’t see it.
The next morning held more promise and sure enough, the sun gave an appearance. Sunday, the last morning, was even better and there are a plethora of beautiful lakes to capture the mountain’s reflection throughout the park. This one is aptly named Reflection Lakes and is a favorite with photographers because it is so easy to get to. Heck, you can even warm up in your car parked five feet from your tripod if you like.
The shot is taken with a polarizing filter which gives a crispness to the mountain. The image is a composite of three images shot at different shutter speeds, all with the same aperture, white balance and ISO. It was shot with a tripod and then combined in Adobe Lightroom with HDRsoft’s 32-bit Merge To TIFF plugin, then natively adjusted in Lightroom. I did some color correction in the foreground to warm it up.
Click on photo for a larger version. As this is a composite, the number shown below are an averaging of the shutter speeds used as they were the only variable to change between images.