Tag Archives: Rocky Mountains

Technical Details: Canon 5D MkII, Canon 16-35mm @16mm, ISO100, f/16, 3 brackets at +-2 stops

Welcome to today’s post.  Over the weekend I attended a family reunion in Estes Park, CO and had a very little time to shoot.  What time I did have was put to good use with a morning trip up to Bear Lake and then further on to Nymph Lake.   As I’ve written in recent posts, the scout is a necessary part of success for a landscape photographer.  I didn’t have the opportunity to scout, so I just relied on luck.

We (my niece, cousin and his wife) all made the trip, with my cousin and I shooting.  In the field we discussed how the scene could be post processed and this, in turn, affected how we shot.  For today’s image from Nymph Lake I used just a Singh Ray warming polarizer and bracketed images.  I knew I WOULDN’T use Photomatix Pro for HDR imaging because I really wanted a pristine, eye catching, photo realistic image.  Photomatix would leave a halo around the tree – sky interface and would have required a great deal of work to eliminate.   The light and colors were perfect.  I bracketed to ensure I had a full range of detail in the scene and used various brackets as layers with masks in Photoshop to create the final tonal range that best represented what my eye saw at the time.  I then used a Selective Color adjustment layer to finish off the image.  I hope you enjoy this image as much as I do.  I can’t wait to go back and spend more time shooting in the Rockies.