new work View From The North Slope

What we see with our eyes is occasionally difficult to capture with a

camera. Our original intent somehow seems light years away when we get

into the 'darkroom', and discover to our dismay, that we have our work

cut out for us. Suddenly, our photographic vision appears to be lost

in hours of tedious post-processing. Ideally, we should not have to

spend a great amount of time creating a work that is pleasing to the

eye. Such is not the case sometimes.

An early Fall afternoon hike in the Refuge found me on the north side

of Little Baldy, a smallish knob of granite near Quannah Parker Lake.

I had been looking for something that I thought might make a good

sunset image, when I came upon this pool of water left over from the

previous nights rain. I felt that I would be able to create a good

representation of the scene with just two exposures and an ND grad filter.

Orignially, it had been my intent to capture two images, one for the

sunset sky, and the other for the foreground landscape. This image was

a 51 second exposure at f18 with a 12mm lens for the foreground. I was

forced to crop the image a bit due to some small tree branches on the

left side of the image. The Nikon D200 is not very good in low light,

so I had to compensate for this shortcoming by creating multiple

images at various exposures, including one that was overexposed to

hold detail in the foreground. This however, left the middle ground

underexposed. The end result was created by stacking multiple images

in 'Enfuse' to generate the final photograph.

All comments and critiques are welcomed - Thomas