Ranier from Maury (HDR), by and © monkeytime.

Last Thanksgiving, I visited the Seattle area, staying on Maury Island (Vashon Island) in the Puget Sound with friends whose house had the back-porch view of Mount Ranier seen in this image. I shot this at about 5:15 p.m. The foreground was in deep shadow, while the mountain was still in relatively bright sun.

I bracketed several exposures with the goal of combining them into an HDR image. In Lightroom, I applied the LR/Enfuse plug-in to the RAW files of two of the bracketed exposures, importing the resultant TIFF back into Lightroom. I then applied an exposure increase, fill light and a graduated filter to further increase exposure in the bottom 2/3 of the image.

I haven’t been a fan of HDR because so many of the HDR images I’ve seen on Flickr look cartoonish or surreal. An image of the Los Angeles River by cinemafia, however, was so natural looking that I’m coming around.

Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Robert Hass, “Meditations at Lagunitas”