Landscape - 2nd HM

2nd Honorable Mention - Landscape

Morning View

Summer wildflowers and sunrise alpenglow on Mt Adams from the Goat Rocks Wilderness in Washington. My wife and I just returned from a 4 day backpack in the Goat Rocks. The views and the wildflowers on this trip were absolutely amazing.

I usually shoot these scenes with a wide angle lens, but that wasn't an option, since the wide angle made Mt Adams look too small. I ended up finding a nice patch of wildflowers about 25 feet from me and then zoomed in to 82mm (Nikon D800, 24-120 Nikkor f/4). This compressed the scene and brought the mountain closer. Since I zoomed in, I had to do a major DOF blend to get everything sharp.

1/4 sec at f/8, ISO 100 for the mountain, fog and middle ridge
1/40 sec at f/16, ISO 400 x4 for the foreground flowers

This was one of the most challenging blends I've ever attempted. I was able to blend the foreground flowers easily using the "Auto-Blend Layers" function in CS6, but blending the background into the foreground was a huge challenge due to the "ghosting" from the moving flowers. I ended up using the healing brush and tons of clone stamps to remove the flowers that were sticking up into the middle ridge.

Thanks for any comments or suggestions you have and please check out the larger version.