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.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
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