Eagle Lake HDR Panorama, Desolation Wilderness, California

This one just squeaks in to my best images of 2011, mostly on account of doing an adequate job recording my first visit to the edge of a beautifully rugged wilderness. I was in a place I’d never been, its grandeur familiar yet wonderfully new to me; a feeling I never tire of. This image was created on my first foray into California’s Desolation Wilderness in July. I had come to Emerald Bay to photograph Eagle Falls and Lake Tahoe at sunset, one of the classic Lake Tahoe views. I’d given myself a few extra hours to make the short hike to Eagle Lake. I was in a great place with better than decent light but found it difficult to put a personal stamp on the scene, and I was running out of time. I decided my best chance for a successful image was to create a clean panorama, this meant heading to the other side of the lake where I could get a more open view of the scene and eliminate all distracting tree silhouettes from the frame. I worked quickly to create three different panoramas from slightly different places along the lakeshore. This is the third one, the one with the cleanest edges and lines. Shot for HDR, this panorama is made from 21 frames, seven sets of three. HDR tone-mapping gave me better blending in the sky between frames by creating more uniform exposures for the panorama segments, and helped open shadowed mountain and foreground exposures. I also used my trusty Singh-Ray soft step graduated neutral density filter to help balance the sky and landscape exposures. The panorama format goes a long way toward expressing the feeling of expansiveness I felt at the time, and helps to elevate the image, if only by a hair, above the documentary snapshot.