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.

Bells Canyon Waterfall

This HDR panorama was created with twelve images, four sets of three.

It had been four years since I’d been to this location, which is strange considering what a magical destination it is, and how close it is. The trailhead is a twenty minute drive, and the hike is about an hour up, if I don’t get too caught up in the scenery along the way. I think it’d been that long because the last time I was there, in June 2006, I made such a beautiful image (first image in my Wasatch Mountains Gallery, “Bells Waterfall”).

In 2006, I was there at exactly the right time, what I considered the peak seasonal climax for this location; shortly before the Summer Solstice, at sunset, on a night when the setting sun wasn’t obscured by clouds.  At this time of year the water is really flowing from spring snowmelt, and the sun, near its northern terminus, strikes the waterfall and granite towers at sunset, but leaves the canyon between in shade. This effect helps to simplify the image and really sets off that crimson sunlit water falling.

  Here's a side by side comparison between an HDR (high dynamic range) image and a single exposure.

The image on the left was created by combining three exposures using Photomatix Pro 3 software. Tone mapping was performed using the Photomatix tone compressor engine. I made adjustments for brightness, tonal range compression, and contrast adaptation. The image on the right is the best single exposure from the set. I've added a slight S-curve in Photoshop to help make it pop. I should note that I've still used my trusty graduated split neutral density filter for capturing this image. Without it, I would have needed to combine a wider range of exposures in Photomatix, and my single exposure would be completely unacceptable.

The HDR image looks much richer. Highlights are toned way down while shadow areas show much more color detail. I'm sure it would be possible to get similar results using Photoshop alone, but it would be much more tedious and time consuming. However, I do prefer the way Photoshop renders blue skies compared to Photomatix, not a big issue in this image, but as I've been working with Photomatix I've noticed some color shifts in areas of solid blue sky that I haven't particularly liked.