Alaska Range in Winter, Sepia

When I returned to do some more photography of the Alaska Range/Denali on Monday, the alpenglow never appeared like it did on Saturday morning. So I worked on other options, one of which was this attempt at a b&w conversion of a 4 image panoramic. I arranged the mountains along the bottom of the frame to stress their relationship with the clouds overhead.

Alaska Range: Mt. Foraker, Mt. Hunter, & Denali

I shot this again in Live View mode, composing the 4 images that make this panorama and checking the exposure. I aimed to retain detail in the highlights (the 3 main mountain peaks – Foraker, Hunter, and Denali), and get some detail in the clouds. Live view has been a revelation in my landscape photography. Real time previews of your decision making process, I almost feel like I’m using a view camera – but high tech. Great fun. The image was of course captured as a RAW color file in the camera. I converted a copy of each of the 4 images to b&w – then “round-tripped” them to Photoshop for the merging into a single panorama. I also did a little dodging on the 3 main peaks as well as the upper most (white) clouds to bring out the sunlight first reaching them. I also burned the heavier clouds over head to gain some contrast in the sky. Finally, I added a slight vignette around the periphery of the image to help draw the viewers eyes inward, and keep them from running out of the pic.

Your thoughts?

Stay tuned.

Posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 1:16 am. Filed under: Alaska, Black & White, Dave Taylor, Denali National Park, Digital Darkroom & Printing, Series: Digital Darkroom Techniques, sky, winter RSS 2.0 feed.