The Coming Storm

MissionPeak-TheComingStormDeanna and I hiked Mission Peak again. Thanks to the clocks springing forward we made it all the way to the top and some of the way down before it became necessary to use flash-lights. For once, we also got to see the sunset.

The bad news was that the storm was coming in fast. If you’ve never seen a dog walking at 45o in to the wind just to stay sure footed on a ridge, you’ve lived your life too safely. It was way to dangerous to take pictures at the top but we stopped half-way down to take this quick nine shot HDR.

For those that want to know how this was created, it’s a bit more complicated than the normal process.

Firstly, we start with nine shots bracketed at one f-stop interval.

Click for larger
Click for larger

Next I processed all nine shots in Photomatrix concentrating on the foreground.

The foreground
The foreground

The I reloaded all the shots in to Photomatrix and did the whole thing again, this time concentrating on the sky.

The Sky
The Sky

Then all I had to do was merge them in Photoshop in the image you see above. A little gradient mask, a tweaking of the vibrance, and of course, because this is HDR, a lot of sharpening. Why did I do a two stage HDR blend rather than just do the normal process? I couldn’t get it right. I wanted the sky over-saturated and the foreground realistic. The storm was coming in so fast, the sun setting, the wind blowing, I was unable to capture the entire dynamic range I needed for each element. Processing it twice was the only way I could think of to get the image.

 

Easy.


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