Spray Park in HDR (Beginners Edition)

For all my seasonal talk about trying to switch up this blog into a more web-friendly experience, swapping in more bicycling again, or delving deeper into content, it’s the side projects of content management that I find more interesting. I recently started organizing and tagging my pictures in Aperture and am learning some tricks there to speed up my processing of them. With many new ways to see my photos, it’s making me want to spend some more time with my camera.

Of course, despite the cool, rainy week, it’s summer, so one should be out hiking and not thinking too much about stuff to make the computers work harder. Saturday found Vic and me with a perfectly clear morning to go explore Mt. Rainier.

Spray Park is a three mile trail from Mowich Lake, a worthwhile destination in it’s own right in the “quiet” northwest corner of the park. The trail includes an excellent view point of the mountain, a gigantic waterfall, and ends in Alpine meadows at the base of the permanent snow fields. We saw a couple fellows with skis coming down from a morning ski.

One also sees plenty of serious photographers up at Spray Park, though they are easy to miss if you are like Vic and me and not so serious, as they go up in the dark to get the sunrises, are no where up there while it’s mid-day, and show up late in the afternoon to shoot the sunset.

Last week, while surfing the web, I learned that building High Dynamic Range photos wasn’t so tricky, though it definitely requires a tripod. Spray Park, with it’s monumental scope lends itself well to the process, so up went the tripod into the not-optimal shooting conditions of mid-afternoon. While there wasn’t the contrast to really make these pictures pop, making them was interesting and I think the process is going to be one that I am going to explore for a while.