Conditions looked good for some nice Alpenglow on Mt. Rainier this evening - a wide swath of cloud-free skies extending west toward the sunset being a key ingredient. But the air was also dry, which meant that even distant edge-of-the-planet sunlight would make it to the mountain.
A few other things made it special: as the atmosphere darkened and turned blue, it gave a slight violet tinge to the mountain, seen in this photo. I suspect there was also light reflecting off of the Pacific Ocean adding to the glow; the glow was dimmer about 30 seconds before I took this shot; the delicate brightening lasted less than a minute total.
The minutiae of mountain light, and I’m excited to have seen it and captured it to share.
Technical info: I got to the site just at sunset proper; the near hills/river/forest were already darkening. I adjusted camera settings to keep a fairly fast shutter speed: these were taken hand-held with a 150mm lens. I was standing on a heavily used bridge and could feel it bounding under my feet. 1/500th of a second was needed to compensate, so I shot at ISO 400 and a ‘modest’ aperture of f/5.6 to keep at least a little depth of field. Fortunately, the mountain stayed fairly bright and those settings help nearly to the end of the sunlight on the mountain.
Here’s an earlier shot: brighter, with dramatic reddening of the exposed rocks, and the first sign of the earth’s shadow creeping up the mountain.