A Tale of Two Mornings

Or three. Or maybe four. I spent last night up on Rampart Range, hoping to get some Pikes Peak above-the-clouds shots, but the cloud deck hadn't settled in below me by 6:30 this morning (it was right over my head at the high point of the road), so I went to Plan B. Plan B consisted of driving frantically towards Cripple Creek, hoping to get above the clouds. Mission accomplished. Now what? Well, there was a sea of clouds all the way to the foothills of the Sangres and the Sawatch, which I shot teles of, but for the life of me I can't seem to extract a decent image out of the files. They're very blue, and very hazy-looking. I might post one later, but I also might not.

Plan C was to head through the fog that was just breaking and go to Victor to shoot some of the mine ruins. Here's one.

Here's another.

Plan D was to drive down Gold Camp Road til I found the cloud deck that was covering the plains. Twenty miles later I found it. Not too many options, but here's one of a couple comps I got.

Plan E was to drive home via either Shelf Road or Phantom Canyon, in hopes of dipping back into the clouds for some mysterious foggy landscape shots. Unfortunately, by the time I backtracked the 20+ miles to Victor, the clouds to the south and west had begun to dissipate. Oh well, they're both nice routes. I chose the Shelf, and found some surprisingly good color down low, towards the low end of the shelf. Here's one of those.

The End...

Geez, i can hardly wait to see plan X! That cloud deck last night was pretty deep, it was foggy with strong east winds at la veta pass all night. Great shots, all plans, but that second shot (w moon) is absolutely killer!!

What the heck, here's one of the sea-of-clouds images I took looking out towards the Sangres. This is at 400mm. The problem is, there's so much blue light scatter that it pretty much sucks all other colors out of the image. The original raw file is so devoid of contrast that it took quite a bit of work with curves just to get it to look like this. I guess I could try a UV filter or something, but I don't own one for my 100-400mm lens.

Any thoughts?

Uhh...buy a UV filter?

I like all of these photos. As far as the blue cast in the last photo, I am surprised that PS cannot take care of that. No suggestions there except to try more options in PS. Thanks for posting these. I thought that photography season was over.

The problem with taking out blue in PS is that after doing so, there's nothing left. It's all blue. Converting to b&w looks okay, but I want this in color.

Todd the first one almost looks like a collage! Really cool.... I like number two with the alpen glow light and the moon.
John

Lots of Plans I see, Todd . Nice photos. As for the blue cast, I'd take it into LR or Camera Raw and play with the White Balance and see what you can do.

I think we're getting a bunch of haze from the California wildfires now so I can see why you had contrast issues with your last photo. I think the blue color is actually kind of cool how it is. Have you though about converting to B&W also?

Hi Todd,

Not much can be done with the blue cast. The problem is that the blue channel is "overexposed" (take a look at the individual channels in Levels). I played around with it a bit to no avail. If you happen to have an (overall) underexposed shot of the same scene, it might be salvagable.

I -do- like the other shots.

Ken

Todd,
I was really noticing the haze today.
Have you tried a hue shift in a very narrow range of the blues? That's purely a stab, as Ken stated, the blue channel may be too dominant for that kind of adjustment.

I still looks pretty cool (pun kinda intended)

Todd, you just didn't wait long enough. See my post.

That shelf road color is great.

Mel-