The sun comes up and lights up the Sierra in the background but it’s not hit the tufas yet. It’s an interesting time to shoot as the light has not yet committed it’s power to our photographs. The things all these images have in common is I lit the tufas myself, in post. There were dark silhouettes when I took the photos but I arranged them in the frame as if they were lit. Why not use a flash? That would have been the smart thing but I’m not one who usually does the smart thing. This was an easy light job using a curve and a warming filter, took ten seconds in Photoshop.
Now these two were finished two totally different ways. One was completely finished in ACR.
The other is a single image HDR done in Nik’s HDR Pro. I think the final image will be the two combined. But what’s the challenge here? It’s seeing the light before there is light, when there is no light, the light you can bring in post to a subject. The camera part is easy, WB-Auto, Vivid EV-.7, it’s the post that might take a second, and only a second to learn and then apply. Find a subject, make a click and then play. You too can do it!