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One of the coolest events that you can see as a landscape photographer is the morning glow on the peak of a mountain. Not being a morning person, I used to completely ignore sunrises when I started in favor of the more comfortably timed sunsets. I reasoned that both are golden hours with warm side-lighting, so I was not missing out on anything by choosing to forego sunrises. That plan lasted until I saw the first light hitting a mountain peak. The first time it happened was in the White Mountains of NH. While it is true that both sunsets and sunrises have warm golden side lighting, it’s a whole different atmosphere during sunrise. Somehow it's quieter, purer and more intimate.
The challenging part for me was to capture the mood and feeling of a mountain sunrise. I struggled quite a bit with the post-processing as well. First, I tried the HDR route and it did not work at all, the images looked artificial ad forced. Then I happened upon an article about Ansel Adams and his processing techniques. It was interesting to learn that Ansel meticulously processed his images, and one of the key elements from the article was that Ansel stayed away from global edit and preferred treating highlights and shadows differently. Until then, I thought the fault was with my photography technique, but I realized the problem was with my editing process. I started watching tons of processing videos online and adjusted my processing workflow to include the usage of luminosity masks. Luminosity masks helped me in isolating my processing for highlights and shadows. And the images started to look better. The last step of the change was to take the images that will work with the processing technique to get the result that I had in my mind. The approach changed from getting a perfectly balanced exposure to getting shots that collected the correct information that’s needed to create the final image. Now, this might seem too mechanical, but the tricky part is picturing the result while you are frantically trying to capture the stunning that lasts a few seconds.
In the next few days, I will be posting images taken a few days apart at various vantage points near Mount Hood. This shot was taken at the perfect moment when the beauty of the light was at its peak. I knew I had to get the details of the very soft light right to get the scene right, so I sacrificed a few shadow details for the final image to work. I could have bracketed the image and made the trees brighter but that would have looked unnatural and distracted from the main subject of the shot.