Have you ever been driving and wished you had your camera with you to take a shot? There is one area that I have driven through for years that I have often wished I had my camera with me. Well, recently I got it done! Here’s the story.
- Sierra Nevada in Spring
I live near Placerville, California and driving east from Sacramento on U.S. Highway 50 to Placerville, you start seeing the beautiful Sierra Nevada mountain range in the distance. At one particular point on that highway, you come up over a rise. There before you is the Sierra Nevada and on a clear, cloudless, blue-sky day with the snow-capped mountains right in front of you it takes your breath away!
Recently, the weather was like that—breezy, clear and cloudless—and being late spring there was still lots of snow in the mountains. I had driven by that spot during the previous week and was determined to finally get “the shot”. I actually drove to the spot and took photos on two separate days to get just the right shot—the one I liked. Here is the resulting shot.
Taking the photograph wasn’t the end of the process, it was the beginning. After I downloaded it from the camera’s memory card, I used Photoshop to bring the photo to the memory I had of the scene. By that, I mean that I always see colors and contrast more vivid than is portrayed in a photograph so I like to bring the scene back to the way I remember it.
The image was in raw format, so I processed it using the Raw converter program within Photoshop (CS5). I increased the contrast and detail using the raw image converter, then I used Levels and Curves to bring up the contrast and get the lighting right once it opened in Photoshop—sort of a roundabout way, but it works for me. I also increased the vibrance and added a bit of saturation so the trees in the foreground would be as green as I remembered them.
I also worked on the sky and the snow individually by selecting each, then working on them separately. It turned out that there was a bit more haze in the sky than I would have liked and I really saw it when I selected all the white of the mountains—there was a slight brownish cast to the original whiteness of the snow. I took care of that by selecting the snow only, then increasing the contrast; for the sky, I increased the contrast and levels of the sky just a bit to bring out the blue as I remembered it.
The next to the last step was to sharpen it to make the green trees pop and give it some depth. Finally, I used Digimarc to protect my copyright and saved the image as a jpeg image.
I will be printing and framing this image over the next couple of weeks and will hang it at Gold Country Artists Gallery in Placerville in June. If you are in the area, come by and see the resulting image!
