Sean Duggan Blog

Idea Paths and App Journies

Someone at my Chamber Door  [iPhone 4]
January 26, 2012
(click in the image for a larger version)

I opened wide the door...
Darkness there, and nothing more.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token...

***********************

I took this photo after my daughter's 5th grade class performed a play about ancient Egypt. The silhouette is their teacher (in long Egyptian robes) saying goodnight from the door to the school auditorium. After playing with the image in a variety of apps, I pondered what the title should be. A good title is often an important part of the creative process for me. It can add to the image and suggest a context or further meaning for a scene.

After wandering down several different conceptual paths searching for a title, for some reason I was reminded of the lines from Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven, where the narrator opens wide the door and peers into the darkness, after hearing "a tapping, as of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door."

One of the things I enjoy most about making images with the iPhone is that it offers a very immediate and compact creative experience that is not weighed down by the considerations or extended time commitments that are often a part of images made with more "serious" cameras. In the case of this image, while I am very pleased with the end result, one of the most satisfying parts of the process was exploring the different idea paths in search of a title and finding the thread that led to the poem The Raven, which I had not thought of for a long time.

For some insight into the fairly simple processing "app journey" of this image, see below:

***********************

Here is the original exposure (cropped slightly to the final proportions). Backlighting is always a situation that has the potential for interesting results, so don't shy away from having your iPhone ready to take pictures at night just because you think it's too dark. It may, indeed, be too dark, but you never know when a door will open or a light will come on to create the backlighting that will lead to an intrigueing image.

 

 

 

 

I started out by using LensLight and added the light beams with the White Rays preset. The great thing about this app is that you have full control over the size, rotation, placement and brightness of the effect you choose (the same developer also has a very cool companion app called LensFlare).

Adding the light rays with LensLight (click in the image for a larger version)

 

The next stop on the app journey was Filterstorm, which is one of my bread and butter "go-to" apps. Don't let the name Filterstorm fool you. This is not really a filter app, but more of a Photoshop-type app. You can apply a wide range of color and tonal effects that function much like those in Photoshop. Plus you can use masks to apply the effects to specific areas of the image. That is what I did for this photo. The light rays from Lens Light were showing up on top of the silhouetted figure of the man. I used the Curves feature in Filterstorm to darken down the shadow areas and remove those light rays on the figure. Then I used the masking tools to paint in the adjustments only where I wanted them. I also applied another Curves adjustment and painted in a lightening effect only on the light rays and backlit parts of the image, as well as added some noise to the entire photo.

Applying local adjustments in Filterstorm (click in the image for a larger version)

 

The final stop was Nik Snapseed, which is an incredibly well-designed and very fun app to use. In Snapseed I made the image black & white, added grain, tweaked with the brightness and contrast some more, applied a sepia-flavored grunge look,  and the final rough-edged frame effect.

Final "flavoring" applied in Nik Snapseed (click in the image for a larger version)

 

If you're interestd in this type of creative transformations for your iPhone images, I will be teaching a half day iPhoneography Creative Processing workshop in Sacramento, California in early June. Be sure to Like my Facebook page, add me to your Google circles (links for both are above left) or sign up for my free newsletter (above right) to keep up to date on the details of that class, which will be posted soon.

The Creative Digital Darkroom on the Monterey Peninsula!

Only two weeks left until my next workshop in beautiful Carmel, California. I'll be teaching a weekend class on The Creative Digital Darkroom: Photoshop Beyond the Basics at the Center for Photographic Art on Feb. 11 & 12. The class is filling up but there are still spaces available so sign up soon if your are interested! Click the class title to find out more about this workshop.

Lightroom 4 Public Beta / My eBook is on Sale

Bear River Rocks  [Canon 5D]
January 2, 2010
(click in the image for a larger view)

It's been awhile since I've posted an image for Time Machine Tuesday, so here's one from two years ago (well, two years and one week ago, to be exact). This was taken along one of my favorite trails that is quite close to my house. An 8-minute drive gets you to the river and then after a 10 to 15-minute hike you will arrive at this spot. I've always liked the arrangement of these two rocks. There's a good balance between them. Finding balance, arrangments and designs in the landscape is one of the pleasures of photographing the natural world.

Real World Digital Photography eBook on Sale!

The eBook version of my book Real World Digital Photography is the official eBook Deal of the Week at Peachpit Press and you can snag a copy for only $9.99! This is a really good price, so if you're interested, head on over to Peachpit Press and place your order before the end of day Saturday (PST) January 14th.

Lightroom 4 Public Beta

Adobe announced the Public Beta for Lightroom 4 late last night (download the beta here). This has been all over the blogosphere and social media landscape, shared and re-shared by seemingly everyone, but on the slim chance that you may have missed it, I am mentioning it here.The 4th version of Lightroom has some exciting new features and improvements. There are good overviews and short demo videos posted at a number of places. Here are a few of them:

Lightroom 4 Videos from Adobe's Julieanne Kost

NAPP Lightroom 4 Launch Center

Photoshop Cafe Lightroom 4 Learning Site

Terry White's "What's New in Lightroom 4 (Public Beta)?"

Upcoming Workshops

I am still in the process of scheduling workshops for 2012 but I wanted to mention three that I am really looking forward to:

The Creative Digital Darkroom: Photoshop Beyond the Basics
February 11 — 12, Center for Photographic Art, Carmel, CA

Creative Transformations with Photoshop
June 18 — 22, Madeline Island School of the Arts
Madeline Island, Wisconsin

True North: Photographing the Interpretive Landscape in Iceland
August 12 — 18, with Focus on Nature in Iceland

I also have a half-day iPhoneography workshop coming up in northern California on June 9th. More details coming soon!

 

 

Paying Homage to Eartha

The Largest Globe  [Canon 5D]
Yarmouth, Maine  • September 2, 2011
(click in the image for a larger, sharper version)

I arrived in Maine on Friday evening and my first stop on the drive north to Rockport was at the headquarters of the DeLorme Company and their map store to photograph the huge globe there. Dubbed "Eartha" by the designer, David DeLorme, it measures 41.5 feet in diameter and has been certifed by the Guiness Book of world records as the "World's Largest Revolving/Rotating Globe".

This is my seventh year teaching at the Maine Media Workshops and on several occasions I had glimpsed the glass-walled atrium containing the giant globe from the highway while driving by but had never stopped to photograph it. This time, since I was driving north by myself, and since it would be evening, I decided that it was a perfect opportunity to check it out. In terms of what the light was doing, my flight arrived a bit later than I would have liked. Earlier in the evening just after sunset would be have resulted in a deep blue color in the sky, which would have worked well with the blue color on the globe itself. Since that wasn't happening for this visit, I framed the scene to focus on just the building with very little of the dark sky showing. Next time I'll try for an earlier arrival and hang around until the sky transitions to that perfect, irresistable blue.

To control the wide range of contrast in the scene I made seven exposures for HDR and blended them together in Photomatix. Further work in Photoshop and many adjustment layers later yielded the result you see above. I actually ended up making the image much darker than the initial HDR result. The reason is that I wanted most of the attention to be on the globe, with the atrium structure playing a secondary, supporting role. And the bushes in front? I really didn't need to see any detail in them, even though in the brightest of the seven exposures, you could see some detail there. Just because you can record detail throughout all regions of the tonal range in HDR, does not mean it's a good idea to keep all of that detail in the final image. The process or techniques that you use should always serve the image, not the other way around.

More from my workshops in Maine in the days ahead. Stay tuned!

The seven source shots for the DeLorme Globe HDR image.
(click in the image to see it larger)

 

 

Day-for-Night HDR, Revisited

 
The Narrow Road  [Canon 5D]
February 25, 2010  Point Bonita, California
(click in the image for a larger view)

I first posted this image about a year and a half ago. The reason this photograph is on my radar screen again is two-fold. First, I'll be in the San Francisco and Marin County area working with some of my consulting clients later this week and I hope to visit this spot again.  Second, I just learned today that my upcoming HDR & Beyond class at the Maine Media Workshops is a go (Sept 11 -17), and since this image certainly fits the description of HDR and beyond, it seemed appropriate to re-visit it for those who may not have seen it before.

The location is the path to the Point Bonita Lighthouse at the entrance to San Francisco Bay (you cannot see the lighthouse from this angle as it is on the far side of the rocky point). I was exploring the Marin Headlands, which is one of the places I like to visit when time permits during my regular Bay Area consulting visits. On this particular day I arrived a bit too late to visit the lighthouse and the tunnel through the rock at the far end of the path above was already locked by the time I got there. But it was still a great place to go for a stroll and the views of the headlands, the rocky coast, the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco were quite spectacular.

This image is a an HDR blend of three carefully-braced hand held exposures (yes, in some circumstances, it is possible to do HDR without a tripod) that were photographed one stop apart using the camera's auto exposure bracketing feature (see below for what the original shots looked like).

The initial HDR blend was created using Merge to HDR in Photoshop CS4 and then the 32-bit HDR file was processed in Photomatix. I enjoy playing around with day-for-night interpretations of some scenes and I knew that this is how I wanted to process this photo. I actually made two separate Photomatix versions: the first one (see below; click to see it larger) created the overall HDR tone mapping effect that I liked, as well as the beginnings of a general flavor of an exaggerated night scene.

But I was unhappy with the strong halo around the tip of the rock, so I made a second version in Photomatix with a darker and lower contrast sky that did not have the objectionable halo (see below; click to see it larger). 

These two versions were then opened into Photoshop and combined with a layer mask (see below; click to see it larger).

Finally, the night effect was enhanced via several adjustment layers that significantly darkened the image, and reduced the overall color saturation, and the power poles in the distance were also retouched to create the final image you see at the top of the page.

••••••••

We'll be exploring the Day-for-Night approach, as well as other ways to venture beyond the initial HDR composite in  HDR & Beyond, Sept 11 - 17. I invite you to join me for a week of beautiful mid-coast Maine landscapes, intriguing lighting challenges, creative photography, lots of learning and good times with like-minded people. In addition to the HDR class, I will also be in Maine the week before teaching Advanced Digital Photography, Sept 4 -10. Both classes are running and there's still room in each one. Click the class titles for more information on these workshops.

Maine Memory Lane

Mirror in a Blue Room  [Canon 5D]
August 21, 2008  •  Cushing, Maine
(click in the image to see a larger version)

Here's another image from the Olson House that I wrote about in yesterday's post. This is an HDR shot made from four exposures, processed in Photomatix and "seasoned" with some additional TLC from several adjustment layers in Photoshop CS5 (you can see the layers panel for the final image below).

 

The four source shots for the HDR image.

 

Location, Location, Location!

I'd love to go back to the Olson House again when I will be in Maine teaching in the first half of September. I'm not sure of its availability as a location, however, since the nearby Farnsworth Museum will still be hosting their exhibition on Andrew Wyeth, Christina's World and the Olson House at the same time. But even if it is not available to visit with one of my classes, the great thing about teaching at the Maine Media Workshops is that there is no shortage of wonderful and scenic locations to explore with our cameras. This will be my seventh year teaching workshops there and the weeks ahead, I'll be sharing several of my favorite Maine images here on the blog.

You can find out more about my upcoming Maine workshops by clicking the image links in the right-hand column below the sign-up form for my free Viewfinder Newsletter.

 

 

 

Bring on the Night: Changing the Time of Day for Creative Effect

Marshall Point Light  [Canon 5D]
August 13, 2008  •  Port Clyde, Maine
(click in the image for a larger version)

From the mountainous Eastern Sierras in the previous post we head to the far eastern shores of the U.S. to the rocky coast of Maine, and a nighttime view of the Marshall Point Light at Port Clyde.

Ah, but is it really a nighttime view?

Actually, it is not. Rather, it is a day-for-night (or, perhaps more accurately, an early evening-for-night) interpretation created from two slightly different treatments of a single Raw file, as well as tonal and color modifications applied via adjustment layers and layer masks in Photoshop.Though creating a day-for-night effect can be somewhat involved,depending on the photo and what the actual time of day was, in this image the changes are fairly simple. They are achieved primarily through an adjustment layer that significantly darkens the scene and another one that makes it seems as if the light inside the house is spilling out onto the porch.

Below you can see the original image, which was taken in the early evening hours after the sun had set (click in the image to see a larger version). You can see a screenshot of the final layers panel for this image at the end of this post.

TIP: The starpoint of light coming from the lighthouse was recorded that way in-camera. If you are photographing bright points of light at night (or in the early evening hours as in this scene) and you want to create the pointed rays of light like this, the trick is to use a small lens aperture. The aperture in this shot was f/18. Of course, in low light situations like this, such a small aperture will necessitate a slower shutter speed and you will need to be on a tripod to ensure that camera motion does not create an unsharp image (the shutter speed for this image was 2.5 seconds).

Advanced Digital Photography Workshop in Maine

Night photography, combining multiple exposures, and creative post-capture interpretive techniques in Photoshop are just some of the many things we'll be exploring in my Advanced Digital Photography workshop coming up Sept. 4 - 10 at the Maine Media Workshops. There's still some spots left so sign up soon if you're interested in getting away from your normal routine and spending a week exploring a beautiful part of the country and focusing on improving your photography and digital darkroom technique.

I will also be teaching my HDR & Beyond workshop immediately following this one (Sept 11 - 17).

• • •

The Final Layers Panel of the Marshall Point Light image:

 

 

Deconstructing an HDR Image

Late Afternoon Light, Eastern Sierras  [Canon 5D]
August 29, 2010  ••  Along Highway 395, California
(click in the image for a larger version)

This shot is an HDR blend of three exposures that was taken almost a year ago during a road trip on the way to Las Vegas. On the first day my route took me up over Donner Pass and down Highway 395 along the eastern Sierras to Lone Pine and the Alabama Hills. Day two was spent photographing in the Alabama Hills in the early morning and then heading east to Death Valley in the afternoon. I spent that night in Death Valley and then did more photography and hiking the next day before crossing into Nevada and making my way to Vegas. On the way back I repeated the route with more time for exploring and making photographs. It's great to indulge in a road trip like that now and then!

The photograph above was taken late in the afternoon on the first day, not far from Lone Pine. The sun was low over the mountains and occasionally covered by passing clouds, which created these beautiful rays of light streaming down over the peaks and onto the edge pf the Owens Valley. Light like that is a powerful magnet for photographers and I made frequent stops to take pictures of it (which is why, when you ask a photographer how long it will take them to drive somewhere, akways add a few hours onto the estimated time!).

I first posted this over on Google+ and someone made a comment saying they'd like to see the orginal source exposures. Here they are below. The camera was not on a tripod, but was braced on the top of my car. The aperture was f/8 and the shutter speeds, in the order in which they appear here, were 1/1600, 1/3200, and 1/800 (click on any image below to see a larger version).

 

These three raw exposures where run through Photomatix to create the result below:

 

After the initial HDR blend created in Photomatix

 

I regarded this as a good start, but only that. The colors were a bit too saturated for my tastes and the contrast was still a bit low. Of course, I could have altered those qualities in Photomatix, but I like to leave my options open. This is why I chose to create an initial HDR blend that had good color saturation but relatively flat contrast. I can always decrease color saturation and increase contrast in Photoshop, with far more localized control than I have in Photomatix. But my options would have been more limited had I desaturated the colors and boosted the contrast in Photomatix.

And therein lies one of the core concepts of my upcoming HDR & Beyond workshop at the Maine Media Workshops this September 11 — 17: That the initial result you create from HDR software is not necessarily the ending point of the process. In most cases the image can be improved much more with further enhancements in Photoshop. The initial HDR composite is not the destination, but just another way station on the creative journey of the image. For this image, the next stop in the journey was an application of a color toning effect that I call "Sepiaesque" that I use on some of my color images:

 

After the "Sepiaesque" color toning.

 

Sepiaesque uses Hue/Saturation layers to create the sepia coloring, plus the Overlay or Soft Light blend modes (the one I end up using depends on the image). It is the blend modes that create the boost in contrast, especially if Overlay is used. After applying the Sepiaesque toning, I added a few more adjustment layers to enhance localized contrast and saturation. The final layer is a color fill layer set to Overlay at 29% opacity to add a warm feeling to the rays of sunlight shinging from behind the cloud.

 

The final image after localized contrast and color tinting for the rays of light.

 

The reasons you might choose to use HDR are varied. They range from a practical need to use different exposures of the same scene to capture a very wide range of tonal values and contrast that would be impossible to record in a single exposure, as in this image, to a more aesthetic choice to explore the different visual style that is possible with the HDR process. Though HDR sometimes gets a bad rap when it is used in a heavy-handed fashion to produce wildly exxagerated and over-saturated images that look almost cartoonish, keep in mind that an HDR shot doesn't necessarly have to look like an "HDR shot". Like any imaging technique, it's just a tool. And the result you get depends on how you use that tool.

The two programs that I use for HDR, Photomatix and Nik's HDR Efex Pro, both offer a wide range of controls for styling the look of the HDR blends they create. But I always go beyond the result created by those programs and further customize and personlize the look of the image in Photoshop CS5. That's what my HDR & Beyond workshop is all about (as well as mastering the camera technique behind HDR captures and just having a really good time immersed in creative photography on the beautiful Maine coast).

Here's a view of the Layers Panel for the final image:

 

HDR Workshop in Maine this September

Gathering Storm Over Lake Superior  •• [Canon 5D]
June 20, 2011  •  Madeline Island, Wisconsin
(Click in the image for a slightly larger & sharper version)

This is an HDR shot from three exposures that was taken during my recent workshop at the Madeline Island School of the Arts in northern Wisconsin. Towards the end of the first day a storm blew in off Lake Superior and we had rain, wind and fog for the next two days. We made the most of it, however, and even in those conditions, came home with some really fine images. I'd rather have storm clouds than a blank, featureless sky any time! I was impressed with the Madeline Island School of the Art's commitment to offering excellent photography workshops and I'm looking forward to returning to Madeline Island next summer to teach more photography and digital darkroom classes. If you live in that area of the country, or want to travel there, be sure to sign up for my newsletter (subscription form is in the righthand column) to keep up to date on workshop dates for 2012.

In addition to using HDR to hold detail throughout all areas of the tonal range, I also used a 5-stop Neutral Density filter from Singh-Ray for these shots. The primary reason for that was to get a slow enough shutter speed to blur the moving water in the foreground. I find that this makes for an interesting visual interpretation of the water but it also helps in the blending of the different exposures. Sharply focused moving water can create blending issues during the HDR process and blurring the water creates much better blending in those areas of the image. This image was processed using Nik's HDR Efex Pro, which is an excellent program for HDR imaging.

September Workshops in Maine

If you want to learn more about the HDR process, and about digital photography and getting the most from your images in the digital darkroom, I invite you to join me on the beautiful coast of Maine this September. I'll be teaching two consecutive classes at the Maine Media Workshops: Advanced Digital Photography and HDR & Beyond. This will be my seventh year teaching at The Workshops. I always have a wonderful time there and I always look forward to going back. It's a great place to get away from it all, leave your regular routine behind and immerse yourself in creative photography. Links to more details on my two Maine workshops are below

Advanced Digital Photography  •  Sept. 4 - 10

HDR & Beyond  •  Sept 11 - 17

Kuskov House: Deconstructing a Composite Image

Kuskov House  [ Canon 5D ]
April 26, 2011  •  Fort Ross, California
(please click in the image for a larger version)

Time once again for another edition of Time Machine Tuesday, where I normally venture back to an image taken at least a year in the past at about the same time of year. For this TMT, however, I am stretching that rule a bit and venturing only a month back (but to a Tuesday!) to an image made on the recent field trip my daughter's 4th grade class made to Fort Ross on the rugged Sonoma County coast. For details on the historical background of Fort Ross, see my previous post.

The photograph above shows a view of the Kuskov House. The structure is a replica of the original commandant's house, which was built around 1818. This is where our group of Artisans slept (our room was on the 2nd floor, at the back of the building). The final image is a composite of three different photographs. The primary reason for the composite was to create a night image that more closely matched the actual view in the deepening dusk at the time I made the image (the two main images were made just before 9pm). With the camera on a tripod, I made two exposures: one to record the darker sky, and a second one to record more detail in the structure and the foreground. Due to the extreme contrast that exists in night scenes, this is often a technique I will use to capture detail in the different areas of the scene that are important to me. You can see the two source exposures for the basic composite below:

 

The shot for the darker sky. Exposure time: 19 seconds

 

The shot to bring out some foreground detail. Exposure time: 60 seconds

After making initial adjustments in Lightroom, the two images were opened into Photoshop as two layers in a single file. A layer mask on the lighter layer created the basic blend of the two exposures. After that, several adjustment layers were added to further fine tune the color and tonal qualities of the image. The open doors at the bottom of the Kuskov House were retouched because I felt that they were too visually distracting. They also did not make sense from a purely strategic point of view in an image of a fortified structure at night that is guarded by two cannon.

The initial blend of the two exposures plus some retouching and several adjustment layers to fine tune the color and tonal qualities of the scene.

I was pretty pleased with how this was looking at this point, but I didn't like that the cannon on the far right was cut off and not fully in the scene. The obvious solution, of course, was to take a cannon fom one of my other shots of this building and add it in. Photographic purists may shudder at the thought, but for this image, such a move makes sense because there really is a cannon there and bringing it back into the image creates a more accurate interpretation of the scene that I remember from the fort. And interpretation is a key word here: this is a fine art, interpretive image and not a documentary or journalistic one.

I did not have any night images that showed the full cannon on the right side, but I did have some shots that had been taken earlier that afternoon. In Lightroom I adjusted one of these to create a darker version with a color tone that more closely matched the actual night scene in my composite:

 

An afternoon view of the Kuskov House, showing the cannon on the right.

The afternoon view after darkening and color balance adjustments in Lightroom.

The partial wheel from the cannon on the right in the origial exposures was retouched and the new cannon was scaled to the correct size and added to the composite. Additional work with adjustment layers was applied to match the lighting and color to the night scene.

 

Adding the full view of the same cannon to the image.
(click in the image for a larger view)

In addtion to adding the cannon, I also used some of the detail from the front of the building in this image and created a layer to add that to the structure in the composite. The reason for this is that in the lighter version of the night scene, no detail was recorded on the front of the Kuskov House. I feel that the finished image looks better with just a hint of the detail showing in that area.

 

Subtle detail on the front of the building was added from the same image that provided the full view of the right cannon. (click in the image for a larger version)

This image was photographed with the intention of creating a composite to better show the scene as it actually looked. Some artisitic license has been applied in terms of the cool, blue color balance, but in terms of the brightness, it is very close to how I remember the view (not that memory, mine or anyone's, is a reliable source; perhaps it is more accurate to say that this is how I choose to remember the view). The addition of the cannon on the right and the subtle details on the front of the building were afterthoughts that did not occur to me until I was working with the layered file. But those additions work well to help create an interesting and evocotive portrayal of the nocturnal scene.

Hopefully this overview of how the image was made will help gvie you some inspiration and ideas for creating your own night composites. The more detailed steps of how this was done were too many to put all of them into a blog post, but I may create a tutorial video of how this image was made. Subscribe to my Viewfinder Newsletter if you're interested in that (the form is above on the left); new video tutorials always appear in the newsletter first. You can see a view of the final Layers Panel for this image  below.

Workshops in June, August & September:

Digtal Photography Essentials & Lightroom Workflow
Madeline Island (on Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin) June 20 - 24;

True North:
Photographing the Interpretive Landscape in Iceland, June 26 - July 2
The 10% Discount for early registration has been extended until May 31;

Icelandic Visions: A Photo Workshop with Mike Shipman & Sean Duggan
Aug. 17 - 26

Advanced Digital Photography; Sept 4 - 10
Maine Media Workshops

HDR & Beyond; Sept 11 - 17
Maine Media Workshops

 

 

 

The Thrill of a New Landscape

Scorched Oasis  [Canon 5D]
Death Valley, California  •  September 4, 2010
(click in the image for a larger version)

 

Here's another shot from the wildfire location in Death Valley. After my initial exploration that first day as I was leaving the park, I returned to this site on my way back through Death Valley after Photoshop World had ended.  I stopped once in the afternoon, but decided the light was not ideal so I had a late lunch at the restaurant at Furnace Creek Ranch and then returned later in the day when the late afternoon and early evening light would be better.

I spent close to three hours hiking through this extensive burn area. New views and image possibilities awaited me at each rise of a hill or curve in the landscape. A tiny rivulet of a stream, quite unexpected here, snaked its way through the dry soil and drifts of gray ash, and stands of blackened palm trees grew along its path, a scorched oasis already showing signs of coming back to life. I had never before encountered a burned oasis and I found it very intriguing on both a visual as well as a metaphorical level.

For me there's nothing quite like the thrill of finding a new type of landscape to explore, a landscape that you've never seen before. There's an almost palpable excitement as you survey the scene and imagine the different photographs that you will encounter as you begin your explorations. And, of course, there's the expectation of finding images that you cannot possibly anticipate, as well as the knowledge that the view will change throughout the day with the shifting of the sun, or the arrival of clouds, a continually evolving scene in the ever-chaninging crucible of light and shadow. 

Technical Notes

This image is a blend of two exposures, one for the shadowed area in the foregound and a second shot for the far mountains and the sky. I actually took three shots with the idea of combining them as an HDR image. I did try the HDR process, but was not thrilled with the result, so I opted for a conventional, manual blending of the two layers with an eye towards creting a more realistic interpretation of the landscape.

The two source files
(click in the image for a larger version)