This is a shot from many years ago, while on a little weekend trip to Mount Rainier with my friends Miles Morgan and David Thompson. The trip was fun, but the shooting didn’t come as easy as we would have liked. This image was taken on the last morning of our trip, a morning that we didn’t really think we’d be shooting due to the dense fog and low visibility. Fortunately the mountain made a brief appearance towards the end of sunrise and I was able to fire off a few series of images before it all went belly-up again.
This one was one of my first attempts at perspective blending back in the day… before I knew that it was even a thing. In this I utilized two different focal lengths to achieve the look I was after. I shot the foreground/midground areas at 16mm (focus stacked with 5 focus points) to get that “wide angle” look, then panned slightly upward and zoomed in to about 24mm and photographed the mountain/background to bring it in a little closer. The stitching was done by hand after some warping, masking together the different focal lengths across where the midground and background meet. After all the tedious blending was done, it was my standard approach of working the light with some dodge/burn layers, some luminosity masking to balance the tonal values throughout, some texture work, and some color work painted in by hand. A couple hours of work total. This may be a bit over the top for some, but I quite like the surreal look in this one.
Anyways, I recently released a new post-processing instructional video. It’s packed with some unique techniques and theories about processing you may not find anywhere else. People seem to really be enjoying the videos and have had nothing but great things to say, so I *think* they are helping people… it’s been awesome to see the many before/after shots people have been emailing me. Be sure to check the videos out if you are into that sort of thing. It’s all on my website, as well as more photos, photo tour info, processing instruction via Skype like everyone else is doing, etc, etc.
2015 Tour Schedule
Arctic Light Workshop – With Arild Heitmann (FULL)
Processing Tutorial Videos
Processing Instruction via Skype
via 500px http://ift.tt/1FkUs65
Sig Nordal, Jr. 