I know many folks are wanting to enjoy the warm weather and here I am showing photos of snowy mountains. I was going through some older photos, doing some sorting and organizing and found these two images that with the new editing feature in Lightroom that just really made these two pop. So I figured I’d share. The top photo was taken while snowshoeing at Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park. I’ve hiked the Elwha Valley many times and always enjoy looking down on it. The image below is the Sierras from the east near Lone Pine, California.
I took this photo a couple years ago (it’s got a lot more snow this year). In the middle distance is the top of Mt Whitney. I was camped in the Lone Pine (California) Campground. This is a 15 second exposure at ISO 3200 taken with my Nikon D810. Below the three stars of Orion’s Belt, the bright star is Rigel. Just above Orion, the yellowish star is Betelgeuse. To the right the bright star is Aldebaran. The small group farther right is the Pleiades.
What’s new with this photo is that I used Lightroom’s new AI noise reduction to minimize the noise associated with the higher ISO and longer exposure. Below see the before and after image … zoomed in 300% so you can see the difference easier. (At 300%, you also see a little of star motion.) You see a lot of the color dots are gone … that was mostly noise. Unfortunately, a few were likely very faint stars. But mostly, I wanted to do a little show-and-tell. You can see it is smoother. Some images will benefit from this new feature more than others. Sorry, but you can’t use it on a JPG image (yet) …
Detail of the Aldebaran area: BeforeDetail of the Aldebaran area: After
The town of Lone Pine, California is located along Highway 395 northwest of Death Valley National Park. Lone Pine was a location used in many western movies and some TV shows. It also provides one of the access points for climbing Mt Whitney (the highest point in the continental 48). The image above shows a clearing storm moving right to left across the Sierras. In the distance is just a sliver of Owens Lake (drained to provide water for Los Angeles).
The image below is taken from about the same location, but looking east towards the White Mountains. Lone Pine lies in the valley.
These are the last of my “lost iPhone photos”. The top one is looking from a viewpoint overlooking the Eastern Sierra Nevada and the valley around Big Pine, CA. The one below is one of the ancient Bristlecone Pines that grow even higher than this viewpoint image. Bristlecone’s (in this area) grow around the 10,000 ft line and above.
I was running through images taken a few months back. Revisit and Review, I call it. Looking at images that I passed over the first time… and reviewing the images that I had processed. This one struck home as an image that I passed over because there was another image taken a mile or two down the road that I liked better and didn’t want to post two images that were similar. But when I went back and compared the two, this one really has a different feel to it.
This is looking across Owens Lake to the southern Sierras … if you click on the image to enlarge it, you can just see the Whitney Portal road on the far left side, where it runs up the foothills above Lone Pine.
