I was working on some images today and feeling cold but instead of pushing up the heat I looked back at some images that I took when Mike and I made a not so triumphant attempt at hiking to the summit of Mount Jefferson on the Caps Ridge Trail. Mike and I got married on the “first cap” of the Caps Ridge Trail twelve and a half years ago with two very good friends as attendants and for the first few years we would go up, stay at the ever wonderful Notchland Inn and hike the trail. We did this until I tore my (replacement) ACL (I’ve now had 4 surgeries on that knee – but that’s a different type of post for a different type of blog) and moved onto to less arduous hikes. But this summer we wanted to give it a try again, and although we didn’t summit we got over 3/4 the way there and it wasn’t my knee that made me ask to turn back, which is a good step (groan).
We got a fairly early start, we thought until we saw the dozens of cars in the tiny parking lot at the trailhead. This summer was very wet and the first weekend in August was the first dry weekend that we had in New England and it seemed like everyone was out for a hike. But it was a beautiful morning, the greens were unbelievably green from all the rain and there was a mist rising off the ground. As we came around a corner of the trail I saw this:
I wanted to make an HDR of the image because the tonal range was just too great for a single shot and I’m not overly fond of tonemapped single images, they never look natural to me. I’d brought the 50D with me because I wanted to keep the weight in my pack down and at that moment regretted it dearly. The 50D is not a bad camera as long as you keep your ISO low, once you go above 400 ISO the noise is very noticeable and the process of making an hdr enhances that. Of course since I was keeping the weight down I had no tripod so I did the best I could I got 6 images taken before the light shafts disappeared but the last 2 in each series (+2 exposure) were very blurry – no way I’m holding anything still at 1/6 sec. (f/4.0 ISO 400). So this was a 2 exposure hdr combined in photomatix, adjusted with Nik Software in LR2 and then adjusted and sharpened with Tony Kuypers actions in PSCS4
Happy Holidays to everyone and I hope next year is as full of love and happiness and fun as can be!
