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Mount Diablo in the Clouds
2 January 2020
We took a walk on New Year's Day before the wind chilled things down to miserable on the comfort index. Climbing a hill, we turned around and saw Mount Diablo in the east covered in clouds.
It was an unusual sight. The peak of the triangular mountain is almost always visible when the mountain is visible. So we took out the D300 and fired away.
We had little hope of actually capturing a credible image. Mount Diablo is about 50 miles away. But capture is only half the game.
We knew we could use the Dehaze slider to cut through what atmospheric haze our circular polarizer didn't eliminate. And we wondered if we would then see the mountain in the clouds.
Yep.
We added some Clarity (or microcontrast) and opened the Shadows in the foreground, which itself was about a mile away.
You can do this sort of thing in almost any current image editing software. We happened to be using Adobe Camera Raw.
And since we were using Photoshop, we thought we'd try a black-and-white version of the image. It was dramatic enough. And that would certainly avoid any color issues in the original version.
We've presented both above.
We only took the one image on our walk. But we're glad we turned around. And we're not surprised we were able to make something out of the original capture seen below (which was not quite what caught our eye):
Camera Original. JPEG extracted from the DNG.
It's a good illustration of what happens when you know your gear and your software and employ each to create the image you want.
