I’ve been watching a lot of tutorials lately about digital photo processing in Lightroom and Photoshop, most by Sean Bagshaw. I attended a class of his last year in Seattle. Ever since I’ve been wanting to step up my skills a bit.

My initial goal is to not hate my landscape photos a week after I’ve finished processing them. I have the tendency to add too much contrast and saturation. It’s easy to bump those adjustments, do a crop, add a vignette, and call it good. The photo will pop but it won’t reflect reality. As it turns out reallity is really difficult to recreate in landscape photography. The sun, which makes landscapes so dramatic and photo worthy, is not a friend of any camera regardless of cost.

I’m not posting this for critiques or opinions. If you want to let me know what you think feel free but it’s not my goal. This blog is the closest I’ll come to having a journal of my photography. Hopefully future me finds it valuable in creating a story of this place and ultimately of me. If not it’s easy enough to delete, romanticism be damned.

###Original### On Saturday mornings, when awoken by the sun, I’m taken aback my the view of the wall to the north: Icicle Ridge. Looking at the photo right off the camera I’m not sure what it is that creates pause. But I take at least one photo each time. There has to be something there.

The above was taken at 50mm, ISO 100, f/16, at ¹⁄₈₀ sec. Hand held. No filters. The initial photo is more bad than good. It’s boring. There is detail in the mountains but the clouds lack definition. The photo feels uneven and snapshotish.

###Edit###

This was about 2 hours of work. Single RAW exposure, no HDR or bracketing. Most time was spent tweaking some small detail that if right goes unnoticed. If wrong the viewer is pushed into disbelief.

It is what it is. Walking away now.