26 Oct 11. Arriving rather late in the afternoon, early evening if you prefer, at the Baker Lake Lodge last Friday I decided to try my hand at getting a shot or two of Baker Lake as one of the participants said the light on the lake, just across the highway, was quite nice. I headed out taking some time to shoot along the way and in the process rousted up a couple of Ruffled Grouse, the first I'd seen in over 4 decades in this part of the country. Eventually I made it to the lake and was very disappointed to see this very tiny body of water situated below a small earthen dam. But I met a gentleman from one of the local communities with whom I had a nice conversation, and then, after he departed, tried my hand at capturing the lake with Mt Baker in the distance at its far end. The lighting was harsh, and it was disappearing fast, so I elected to use the HDR approach to getting the image(s). That evening at dinner I was informed by other participants that what I shot wasn't the "real" Baker Lake, and they invited me to join them the next morning to go shoot it. I eagerly accepted the invitation and we tried that very thing early Saturday morning; the picture I sent a couple days ago was what we saw of the "real" Baker Lake. While we were trying our luck with the morning shoot a somewhat spontaneous discussion arose concerning the use of HDR photography that took the better part of 15 minutes. Part of that discussion had some intense moments and I'll pick up tomorrow with that topic along with a shot taken during the discussion. ISO 200; 1/13 sec @ f /18 (middle of 5 exposures).
27 Oct 11. Having gone about as far as we could up a local "hill" and still have a view, the three of us were each working on our individual approaches to capturing the moment when I made an offhand comment about the lighting being a good time to employ the HDR approach, which you will observe I didn't for this image (dark area in LRH corner). One of the other photographers immediately stated that such photography was gimmickry and that real photographers shouldn't have to compete with them. In that I like the approach, and think it a valid way to show what the eye can capture and photography can't in a single exposure, asked him to explain himself. He stated that images shouldn't be manipulated but be required to be just what comes out of the camera. I then asked if he was shooting the RAW format and he said no, he was shooting jpeg images. The third photographer then made the statement that jpeg images were manipulated by the computer in the camera. That tended to really irritate the other individual, and when I then asked about how making an HDR image was any different than the manipulations done by Ansel Adams on ALL his images I got a red faced reply that what Ansel did was different. To which when I asked how, the response given was that Ansel used chemicals, not a computer. Both of us who were asking the questions then did a bit of "education" about how the modern cameras manipulate the images for him, sometimes considerable amounts over which the jpeg shooter has no control, as compared to the total control available with a RAW image, and things shortly returned to normal. All-in-all I found the conversation to be somewhat amazing considering the digital age in which we are all shooting. The image you see today is a composite of 10 shots that I've stitched together. Mt Baker at 10,781 feet is on the left and Mt Shuksan at 9,131 feet is on the right. In the very ULH corner you can faintly see the moon. ISO 200; 1/200 sec @ f /14 on a tripod.
The adjusted version.
