Mt. Rainier Panorama

The sun came out, and so did Mt. Rainier

Seattle is far enough north that winter sunlight is noticeably limited. The sun is at a low angle all day, and it rises and sets well south of east and west compass marks.

Since we live northwest of Mt. Rainer, that means the mountain is mostly in shadow for most of the day. On the rare sunny days we do get in winter, I was happy to try photographing the back-lit mountain.

This is a panorama. I took six images, each one overlapping a bit (maybe ⅓) with the previous one. I stitched them together in Photoshop, which did a poor job so I spent some time removing a weird curving horizon it created.

Rainier is mostly clear of clouds from this viewpoint (north of Orting, WA), but the Cascade Range is swaddled in low clouds. In the summer, this field is a pumpkin patch, but it was mostly bare today.

Technical info: The images were taken several stops underexposed for the scene, but exposed correctly for the brightness of the mountain. In development, I brightened the dark areas to bring them up to ‘normal’. I used de-haze to bring out some of the contrast in the mountains and clouds. You can see pockets of thicker haze here and there…

Taken with a 135mm lens. I used f/11 to insure that both foreground and background were all in focus. The original image was 2.5GB stitched together; I made a half-size version of that, and then the JPG is a half-size version of that. I also used fairly aggressive compression to get it to the point where I could upload it with my rather terribly slow Internet connection here in Orting.

There is a slight color shift in the image; it is a little more blue/cyan on the right, and a little more red/yellow on the left. I think this is probably due to polarization angle changing across the panorama.

How dark were the exposures? Not that it was terribly important (the Sony A7r IV can capture light well beyond what the human can see, in both brighter and darker directions), but here is an untouched image after downloading from the camera.

Pretty dark. :)