Dave Morrow Photography: September 2014

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I recently spent 6 days backpacking in Montana's Glacier National Park. We started up near the Canadian border on the East side of the park and hiked 36 miles South through Glacier's wild back country. There wasn't any close contact with bears so that's a plus!

Here are a few Behind the Scenes Photos from the trip. I'm currently working on editing some portfolio images from Glacier, let's just say, the skies are nice and dark in that part of the country! Milky Way galore.

My Brother Lee & I Hiking in Glacier National Park, Montana

The landscape of Glacier are some of the best I've ever scene. This was taken on a 5 day backpacking trip in Glacier's back country.We stayed out late and captured the Milky Way rising over the massive peaks in the distance which are just a few miles south of the Canadian Border.

Looking North Towards Canada from the Top of Red Gap Pass

The Shot
Anyone that's been to Mount Rainier probably knows this location. Back in 2013 I was driving past Reflection Lakes on the way home from a night of milky way photography and stumbled across near perfect conditions for a twilight shoot.

This shot was taken well before sunrise, but the camera still picked up a nice little glow out of the South East which can be seen in this composition. It comes from single RAW file which was lightly processed in both Lightroom & Photoshop using the following techniques. The total processing time took about 20 minutes.

Lightroom

Provide "cool" feel to the photo using Temperature & Tint Sliders
Recover Shadows & Blacks
Minimal Vibrance Boost
Lens Profile Correction & Remove Chromatic Aberration
Export to full size TIFF file

Photoshop

Apply Tony Kuypers Luminosity Masking Actions & Techniques to bring out the "mid-tones" and darker shadows in the photo. I also added slight global contrast.
Minimal selective color balance adjustments to give the photo a "cool" feel.
Selective adjustments on the "foggy" parts of the photo to bring up the brightness.
Final Web Sharpening once again using the TK Actions noted above.
Save for web as JPEG in sRGB color space. Good video tutorial on that topic HERE

It's somewhat hard to see on the web size version of this photo, but full size the water droplets on the grass in the foreground really sparkle and add depth to the photo:)

As always click the photo to see it full size on a black background