Mt. Rainier Vista
(This is not a small picture; this is a 50% of full size JPG and I suggest you click to view just the picture, then click again to get full size.)
My favorite photo of the mountain; I accomplished a few things here that I have been learning about over the last year.
Technical info: shot with Sony a7R IV, with a Canon 300mm lens mounted with an adapter. The exposure was carefully constructed:
f/8 aperture. I have been noticing that the depth of field on my images with many of my Mt. Rainier photos is not as deep as I would like it to be. I like it best when the mountain is as sharp as possible, and that intervening mountains and trees as well. I had to use f/8 to both distance and medium distance sharp. The left some of the closest things not quite sharp, but f/8 is a very sweet spot for this lens in sharpness, so I went no further.
1/1000th second exposure. As I was focusing, I noticed that there was a huge amount of air turbulence, most likely from solar heating of the various surfaces between the lens and the mountain. I know from experience that even fairly fast movements can be frozen with an exposure this fast, so I underexposed by about 1.5 stops in order to get both f/8 and 1/1000th of a second.
ISO 100. That is the optimum ISO for the Sony, yielding best detail and color balance.
This is a panorama constructed from three images, created by rotating the camera and lens on a carefully leveled tripod.
I was fortunate to be able to hit what I considered my optimal targets for all three exposure parameters.
I made up for the underexposure in Capture One. I brightened by zones: the black (darkest) areas got a significant boost (probably closer to 2 stops), medium shades got a less dramatic boost. At the end, I brightened the image overall by about a third of a stop, and that gave the mountain a certain glow that was just as I saw it in real life.
The dramatic clouds were great to have, too.
The 1/1000th of a second exposure really ‘froze’ the image details. I usually struggle to get the details; once I realized it was from turbulence I knew what I was going to try to do to fix it. :) This is a small piece of the image at 100% scale: