Mountains and HDR

(June 3rd) Walking around during high noon is definitely not the best times for taking photographs, so you have to try something different. A picture will not cut if based on tonality or color, the light is just too harsh. Ansel Adams once said that you don't take a photograph, you make it. If you can't rely on tones, composition and lines can become dominant elements. The key is to get a different perspective than people are used to seeing - and the only limit is your imagination and creativity. That's the thought process I was trying to use in shooting this walkway through the mountains in abysmal light.

While the light was still bad, I ran into these three peaks along the walkway you just saw. In a place like this there are so many peaks, so many views that the difficulty is in limiting the view. A camera puts a rectangle frame around the big expanse an eye normally sees - and this framing is one of the most important decisions you make before pressing the shutter. A complicated image usually is an ineffective image. For this reason many of my landscape shots are made with a telephoto lens.

As much as I tried to avoid it, the light gradations were well outside the tonality you can capture in a single image. When I ran into situations like this, I shot multiple exposures planning on doing HDR processing afterwards. That was before I had done any real HDR processing, but I figured I could learn pretty quickly - after all, how hard could it be. The first image I processed took around 4 hours and I wasn't happy with it. I've now gotten it "down" to 1 hour per image, but this is no good. The images I post all have very minimal processing (things like correcting color casts), which is usually done in a minute's worth of time. The time spent in creating each image is in the patience and choices behind the camera, not on the computer. I don't mind spending 3 hours waiting for a bird to show up or turn its head the right way, but I don't want to spend it on the computer. I'm sure I can make the HDR process faster, but it still takes more time than a normal image. So it will be a technique I use very sparingly - at least now I know what kind of images lend themselves best to HDR. Here's an HDR shot looking out over the vast sea of pillars from one of the peaks of Zhang Jia Jie. All that time spend, and it's not even my favorite picture of the afternoon :P

Chinese national parks have a few differences from U.S. parks. One of the biggest is how people relate to the parks. In China, the country is so old that all these natural areas have been used by humans for centuries. So there are pieces of human culture inside every park that I visited. In Zhang Jia Jie, when you climb one of its highest peaks, you find a Buddhist temple near the summit. It definitely felt like a scene out of a movie. I kept waiting for the martial arts experts to arrive...

From one of the peaks we were able to look out over much of the surrounding landscape. Nestled in the mountains you could make out part of Baofeng Lake that we had visited earlier. Mountains on all sides protect this beautiful lake.

Of course right as the light starts to get good it is time to leave the park. I think this is always the case when you have a camera with you. On our way down and out of the mountains I stopped to take a shot of this cliff face.