autumn - Little Tahoma on Mount Rainier from the Cowlitz River Canyon

©2005 Ed Book

I made this photograph late one autumn afternoon. On windless sunny days, moisture builds in the air around the mountain from transpiring snow and ice which translates as haze to the eye. It also gives the effect of greater distance. You can see it here (well, you can in the full size version) where the near ridge on the right has much more detail than the peak of Little Tahoma on the left. Little Tahoma is about double the distance than the ridge.

I optimized this image in Photoshop Lightroom and decided that I wanted a little more sharpness without getting halos around abrupt edges so opened the image in Photoshop and added a duplicate layer. I used a high pass filter which overlays a monochrome layer centered on a 50% gray with highlights brighter and shadows darker (duh) and the extent of each being controlled by one slider. Then I changed the blend mode of the layer to 'soft light'. ('soft light' renders anything brighter than 50% as brighter still and vice versa) It's a way of increasing contrast and apparent sharpness with more control than using a contrast adjustment. Fine tuning is accomplished by varying the opacity of the soft light layer.

I have a friend who regularly drops in dramatic skies to make the images shout and I do on occasion when I feel it's needed but here I like the sky as it moreso depicted the feeling of that autumn afternoon. (also, a dramatic sky with the muted peak would have looked too artificial)

Sometime that day, before making this exposure I had a dust accident. I must have changed lenses without turning off the camera and the charged sensor pulled in dust. The reason I waited almost four years to optimize this image was because of the literally hundreds of dust spots that would have to be healed from the sky. I was working away spotting and then realized that I'd spent and hour and was only a small way through the task. I took the image into Photoshop and increased contrast so that I could make an easier and more accurate selection of the sky so I could use a dust busting filter. Then, I used blending to overlay the de-dusted sky on the image.

Because of ongoing dust challenges, I recently sent the Canon EOS 1Ds Mk II to Canon service for cleaning and to have the focus alignment checked and adjusted if needed. I felt naked without my workhorse and the G9 didn't help much with the images I was making during the two week absence of it's big brother. (the shipping was ~$60 and service ~$220. Yikes!) Another good reason for ugrading/downgrading to the 5DMkII which I haven't done yet... Anyone using this new 5D? how are your dust challenges?

ps Is this image displaying full or just a thumbnail in the corner of a big black box? I've found these embedded objects to display both ways when refreshing... not a good thing... (I wonder if it's my Firefox browser doing it.)

Peace