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This shot is of the beautiful Smith Rock State Park near Bend Oregon. I took this early this summer when we did a road trip to Washington state. Due to some inclement weather and an unexpected snowstorm, some of the roads around Mt Adamas were completely blocked and ruined some parts of our planned trip. So, we decided to drive straight to Bends and revisit some of our favorite spots around our favorite town in Oregon.
We reached the Smith Rock state park early morning before sunrise and had some of the best cloud formations we have ever see. The sun was coming up from behind us and the colors and light that were falling on the rock cliffs were nothing short of brilliant. I couldn’t use the ND filter here due to the very uneven horizon and that the fact that all my ND grads are Hard NDs. This would have been perfect for a soft ND grad, but since I didn’t have one, I used just a polarizer and a few metering tricks to get the exposure right. Most of the modern DSLR’s have excellent metering systems and the central weighted as well as the spot metering settings can be incredibly helpful in tricky situations. For this shot, I used the central weighted metering mode at the brightest spot in the sky and then used positive exposure compensation until the histogram looked right. I also wanted to give a shoutout to Nikon for finally getting a perfectly calibrated rear LCD and histogram on the D850, it’s a huge improvement over the over exposing rear screen of my D800.