Have a look at Resurrection!
Friday, August 6th 2010 @ 1:35 AM (not yet rated)
I've just put a new gallery up, on our recent day-trip to Mt. St. Helens, the mid-Washington volcano of the famous explosive eruption thirty years ago. It was a beautiful late-afternoon as we arrived at the Visitor Center just north of the mountain.
The sun already moving down to the "side" as we looked south at the mountain, therefore giving us better shadows than if we'd been there earlier. In fact, shooting this scene of a summer's mid-day lighting would be VERY disappointing ... you wouldn't hardly have anything to see in the pictures you took!
The mountain's self-destructive and massive eruption/blowout covered EVERYTHING in sight with ash and ash-coated volcanic rock from it's own blown top and side. It's a light and VERY reflective grey, so it bounces light around quite effectively filling in all shadows and lessening visual light-dark contrast dramatically.
A "normal" afternoon scene of mountains will have a dynamic range (light to dark tones) exceeding the camera's ability to record detail ... if you set the exposure to record the darkest spots in the shade of the deep-green forest canopy as "black" the whitest spots of snow and cloud will be white past any detail. If you set the exposure to hold the detail in the whites, you'll have quite a bit that's very dark or black, probably more than you really want.
Yet in this very odd landscape, the lightest shades of cloud and snow were only a few stops lighter than the darkest shadows under plants, and far less than any "normal" mountain scene. I had to increase the contrast of the image in my Lightroom controls far more than I normally would do. In fact, normally for a summer mountain scene I LOWER the contrast settings from "normal", not RAISE them substantially higher than "normal"!
And yet, the resulting histograms for these images AFTER all "darkroom" manipulations still show nothing even approaching the light and dark ends of the scale. So the late-afternoon shadows were very necessary to allow the viewer to "see" anything at all but a solid light-grey blah!
Enjoy ...
Mt. Saint Helens gallery ...
R. Neil Haugen, M. Photog. CPP., FP.
