...the heart has its seasons its evenings and songs of its own...Robert Hunter

This image is one of my more personal photographic expressions.  Captured in the foothills near the mouth of Red Butte Canyon, it doesn’t really say that much about the specific location but rather speaks of a place in the inner self, some universal geography of the heart. The image’s simplicity is amplified by the vagueness of its reference to the landscape. And yet, without this reference to terra firma the power of the image is lost.

Above is a side by side comparison showing a detail from my previous post of a single RAW image file processed in Adobe Photoshop (left) alongside the same detail from a tone-mapped HDR image processed with Photomatix, using tone compressor default settings (right).

I like this image, enough to think it’s one of my best of 2011, but felt my best exposure looked quite flat, it definitely needed some work. Since I typically bracket my exposures when working from a tripod, I had a set of exposures to work with, and my first instinct was to combine exposures to create an HDR image. I hoped this would bring a little snap to the image; and it did, but on closer inspection, detail in the clouds was getting blown out, and there was noise in the foreground water of the falls.

Eagle Falls, Lake Tahoe, California