20 Jan
2011

Posted in: Mt. Rainier
By Ian Plant    4 Comments

Mt. Rainier wildflowers and fog, Mazama Ridge

Joe Rossbach and I are working hard right now to put the finishing touches on our newest eBook, Five Landscape Challenges 2, which we hope to release next week. This book contains tutorials for five common types of landscape scenes. One of the five tutorials is “Alpine Flowers,” and it contains everything you need to know in order to make great mountain flower photographs. One of the images in the book is featured below.

"Foggy Surprise" - Mt. Rainier

I took this photograph in August 2010 during a trip to Mt. Rainier National Park in Washington. One morning I woke to a pleasant surprise—a layer of inversion fog in the valleys below Mazama Ridge that formed overnight as moist air rapidly cooled. Since there were no clouds above Mt. Rainier, I ignored the mighty peak and instead turned the other way toward the rising sun, looking for a composition that would juxtapose the fog with a field of wildflowers. After scouting the area for several minutes, I settled on this densely packed patch of lupines and Indian paintbrush. Because I was pointing my camera down with a wide-angle lens, there is some distortion in the photo, which is particularly visible near the edges of the image frame. One can correct distortion in Photoshop, although sometimes at the expense of image quality if the distortion is significant. Here, rather than correcting for the distortion, I used it to artistic effect. The distortion adds an element of dizzying perspective to the image, providing a visual cue that one is looking down a steep ridge that plunges precipitously into the valleys below.

I made this photo during dawn twilight, before the sun rose, when the light in the sky was the most intense. Because of the low light conditions, my exposure was thirteen seconds. Luckily, there was absolutely no wind that morning, allowing me to capture this detailed scene with tack sharpness.

Technical details: Canon 5D Mark II camera, 17-40mm lens (@19mm), Singh-Ray 2-stop reverse graduated neutral density filter, ISO 400, f/16, 13 seconds.  

About Ian Plant  (275 Posts)

Ian Plant's photographs and instructional articles have appeared in a number of books, calendars, and magazines, including Outdoor Photographer and Popular Photography. Ian writes a regular blog column for Outdoor Photographer online, and he is the author of numerous instructional eBooks and digital processing tutorials. Ian leads several photo tours each year.