Winter Mt. Rainier

Wind was up, blowing snow all over the mountain

I took two cameras and a bunch of my best lenses out yesterday to get photos of Mt. Rainier. The weather had been all over the map in the morning - sun, clouds, overcast. But in the early afternoon, the sky mostly cleared and the mountain was out.

I went to a little skateboard and bike park in Orting, WA to take my shots. It was very cold, around 20ºF. Wind was up a bit, but the wind on the mountain was much more intense. You can see how much blowing snow there was—given that the mountain is nearly 3 miles high (14,000 feet), those ‘snow drifts’ at the top are lifting the snow up about a thousand feet.

The exposure was deliberately set up to emphasize the mountain—the sunlight on the snow is brighter than the clouds at left. I underexposed the image to capture the details on the right side of the mountain. I also used a polarizing filter to darken the sky, which makes the blowing snow easier to see.

This left the ground level in front of me underexposed, but I think exposing for the brightness of the snow created a more dramatic photo.

Phase One IQ4 150 camera, vintage Mamiya 645 150mm f/2.8 lens @f/8.

It was so cold that when I took my gloves off to put on the polarizing filter, my fingers got so cold in those 90 seconds that I had to pack up and go get warm. I’ve never had my hands so cold—I’m not normally silly enough to take off my gloves in that kind of weather!

Earlier, I had set up the Sony A1 camera with a 500mm Canon FD lens to get a close-up of the peak of Mt. Rainier. Like the Mamiya lens above, the FD is a vintage lens, from about 1980. But it’s very sharp, and I got a very detailed photo of the peak of the mountain.

My fingers were still warm in my gloves at that stage, so I took some additional shots and made a panorama in Affinity Photo.

The black lower corners are because I didn’t take enough images for the bottom row of the panorama. At full size, a print would bel big enough to fill a wall!