Ominous Approaching

PLEASE VIEW LARGER IMAGE

Ever notice how, sometimes, your photography may reflect the kind of season that you are going through, the moment your photo was taken? Of course life is flavored with a myriad of seasons, some beautiful, maybe nearly euphoric. Some dark as the depths of night. Most somewhere between these two extremes.

The approach: this image was taken in late July, after finishing my Glacier National Park workshop. My assistant and I simply could not get enough of the area (when can you ever get enough of Glacier NP?) so we decided to stay in the park an extra week and spend an entire day 4-wheeling every accessible dirt road we could find around the park. Just as we were coming up an incredibly steep hill I caught this scene to my left, abruptly stopped, locked in the parking brake, jumped out of my vehicle running, while emphatically telling my assistant ¡§there¡¦s a photo right there!¡§ Hand held, we shot immediately as the moment came and went within a minute or two.

Techie stuff for those techy-ish:

This is a single raw file (shot to the right of the in camera histogram) mainly finished in Camera Raw 8.2 / Lightroom 5.2 Raw (I often go back and forth between the two interfaces, because I teach both). As always, my somewhat innovative approach to Blending using the Layer Style ¡§Blend if¡¨ options was used for a wide variety of processes including (but not limited to) blending for dynamic range, advanced B+W tonal control, very subtle advanced dodging and burning, sharpening fall off of the extreme darks and lights, and to pull the deep shadows of the land, a little bit, out of complete silhouette (which I do not always believe is necessary). Lastly, the image was sharpened for web using some twists, turns and improvements on what some may call the ¡§Adamus¡¨ advanced pre-sharpening and then downsizing technique.


Canon 5D Mark2
Canon 24-105L
105mm
f/8 (sharpest f/stop)
1/1600 shutter (w stabilization on)
100 ISO

Feel free to Facebook me if you so desire. I generally share even more gruesome details there.

Thanks for looking! ļ