The Misty Mountains

Many thanks to Barry and Free Photo Resources for posting that interview with me yesterday – here’s a link if you are interested. Thanks also to the folks at digital photography school who used my “Light Years” photo as an example in their list of “15 Tips for Low Light Landscape Photography“. If you are into photography and you don’t yet know about DPS – add it to your bookmarks.

Today’s daily photograph is available in two formats – the first is the full image, small enough for you to see all at once on your monitor. Scroll down a little further to see the second format – a vertical slice through the image. As this is another huge panorama, I thought I’d push tWp’s bandwidth again by posting a huge vertorama version of it. Look out later this week for a collection of all the vertoramas I’ve posted.

I thought we would head back to Glacier on the pages of tWp today, it being a rather blustery, snowy and Glacier-y day. The weather moves pretty fast out there and a sunny morning can turn dramatic and gloomy before you know it. Images like today’s and yesterday’s remind me that HDR photography need not glow like crazy with tons of detail and light coming from every pixel. Sometimes a moody, dark approach that clips the detail is what makes the photograph. Although this image is definitely HDR, and probably recognizably so, it also has clipped shadows and highlights, which I think is pleasing to the eye and central to good HDR – you need white and black anchor points to make sense of the light you are seeing.

The scene was straight out of a Tolkien novel – the misty mountains made real before us (Tolkien fans may want to check out Barad-dûr). I’ve got a few images that remind me of Tolkien’s work and I think a “Middle Earth” gallery is in order before long.

Photo by Justin Kern – Feel free to use images with links and credit – no commercial use without permission.