Hood Wide
Sun sets over the Hood River Valley

So the other day, after what seemed like an eternity locked up indoors in the editing suite (aka my room) I managed to pick the locks and get outdoors for a bit to shoot some photos. It was a beautiful cloudless fall evening, so I decided to drive up HWY 35, find some logging roads and see if I could find a good vantage point of Mt. Hood. It took me about 20 minutes to find exactly what I was looking for up a winding, undeveloped road just outside Odell, OR.

Since the sun was setting and casting a pretty mean shadow across the North face of the mountain, I figured it’d be a good opportunity to try some High Dynamic Range photography, HDR for short. Read about HDR photography here. HDR allows you to expose every area of a photograph perfectly, regardless of sharp differences in lighting. On the conservative side, HDR creates an image that’s closer to what the human eye actually perceives. However, HDR turned up to 11  can create an image that lies closer to psychedelic illustration than to photography.

I’ve been wanting to try this technique for a very long time but because of lack of proper gear or more recently lack of time, I had not given it a try.

Until now.

5 pm Mt. Hood
5pm, Mt. Hood
Hood super close
Can't wait to retake this after some new snow

It’s crazy how each one came out a bit differently. The process involves several software and setting intensive steps, so I doubt I could reprocess any one of these and make it turn out the same.

I really like how you can walk the fine line between photo and illustration with these images, so I’ll definitely be fine tuning and utilizing HDR a lot more in the future.