Artist Point Meadow, Mount Shuksan. Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, Washington. August 28, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
The view of cloud-shrouded Mount Shuksan from a heather-filled sub-alpine meadow at Artist Point, Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, Washington.
As my brother and I came around the corner of this trail along the side of the Artist Point ridge, it took our breath away. I arrived a moment after he did, and found him already down among the heather flowers near the small run-off creek setting up his tilt-shift lens to make a close-up photograph of the flowers with the mountains in the distance. Once he finished, I went to work on this wider view of the scene, including the nearby foreground meadow and flowers, the trees along the edge of the drop-off, the pool of light in the valley beyond, and the shoulder of cloud-rimmed Mt. Shuksan with a dramatic sky beyond.
On a technical note, this was a very difficult exposure. When I looked down at the flowers and plants I saw what you see here, and when I looked up I saw the cloud-filled sky roughly as it appears in this photograph – but the dynamic range was so wide (ranging from parts of the foreground trees in deep shadow to distant snow fields in direct sun) that one exposure could not capture all of the scene data… so I used three which were then combined in post using masked layers and blended manually.
This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
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