Mountain Dreams

Cutting through the heavy haze of Appalachia is the challenge of the Blue Ridge Photographer, but also one of the most fulfilling aspects of photographing in this area. Working within the deep blues, and high contrast scene is exciting, but can be harrowing. It leaves you feeling worried after the light has faded, on your way back home you keep wondering if you had done everything you needed to to capture the scene. You know that others absolutely nailed it, but your shot could be an utter failure. This scene lasted just a few minutes off the parkway, bright hot light in the sky, cold haze through a tunnel of shadows just bellow. My mountains dreams spread out before my lens, a sigh of baited breath, a click of the shutter, a moment captured.

Overlooking the Qualla Boundary, this scene is everything that is difficult about Appalachia mountain photography. deep shadows, hot bright light, high contrast, and heavy unrelenting haze. This is the perfect example of what to expect stepping into this level of photography. Certainly the average smartphone can level all of this for you simply, but it tends to oversaturate, and overly simplify the photo. It looks fine, for certain, and I have no grudge against smartphone photography, I encourage it to get started. Capturing this scene as a single shot requires a lot of work learning your equipment, and I encourage going out and experimenting.

This particular edit is both in depth, and simplistic all in all. I spent a lot of time just removing the heavy haze, and recovering detail from my shows to give a full look at the scene, before I applied a simple dodge and burn over some of the mountains. The difficult part of this scene, for me at least, was properly grading the colors to the warmer colors on top, while still keeping my cool blues. It takes practice, but its worth learning.

Until Next Time!

Aperture: f8
ISO: 640
SS: 1/500th
Focal: 36mm

Fujinon 16-55mm