Mt. Rainier Shrouded in Cloud
The Mountain is often said to wear a hat; I dare say, this is a scarf.
I rented a Nikon 500mm lens because I wanted to see if it would help me take better pictures of birds. It has an extremely small field of view, so you would not really use it for taking panoramic shots of a mountain.
As I was bringing the lens home, I saw Mt Rainier with some wildly tossed clouds, and ever the optimist I grabbed the only lens I had and took 15 photographs with the idea that I would make a panorama out of them later.
Never mind that I was taking shots with a camera and lens I did not yet know the first thing about: I pointed the camera, I focused, took the shots.
Later, I learned that the camera was set up to take JPG only, which is to say I had not room to squiggle the color afterwards, nor could I do all the other tricks I like to do in processing because I didn’t have enough data (JPGs can have up to 256 colors; RAW images have a range of 16.7 million colors. Slight difference; no matter, press on.
Because I am not an idiot but sometimes act like one, I took three sets of these images. The first one was ruined by a single shot that was out of focus (I blame it on the excitement). The second set was out of alignment (still too excited, I figure, but actually I was shooting hand held without a tripod which is not a smart choice with a 500mm lens—I had no tripod, so there was that). The third set was what you see here: focused, adequately aligned, magical.
I confess; I did some filling in some gaps of the sky and foreground because alignment was not perfect. I could barely contain the mountain in 15 shots at 500mm!
Even so, really happy with the final result.