Copyright © 2010 Deborah M. Zajac. All Rights Reserved

This photo was taken back in July. Dali (DD) and I had gone early to Mission San Juan Batista to photograph the interior of the Mission. We were meeting a couple of friends there later in the evening to shoot Star Trails.
After finishing the Mission we decided to head up to Fremont Peak for the sunset. We got up to the top parking lot then hiked up to the top and spent some time taking photographs of the valley. The sunset didn’t look promising, and the fog was rolling in. We decided to head down for some dinner then meet our friends. Driving down the mountain Dali said “Oh look, there’s color!” I quickly found a place to pull over then we raced around getting our gear out, and tripods up, and the shot taken before the sun went down. Look how close I came to missing it!

I forgot all about this shot until recently. Dali posted his on Facebook a couple of weeks ago which reminded me I hadn’t processed mine either. It required a double process. I made 2 duplicates of the original file then processed one for the sky, and one for the foreground. The sky layer really didn’t need anything, but the foreground layer I thought needed a bit of dodging to open it up to look more the way I saw it. My camera saw it as a silhouette. I was able to see more detail. Like this.
Then I stacked the two layers, added a mask and painted in my sky.
I’m sure there is a much easier way to do it and this was the long way around. I am just happy I knew how to do this much in Photoshop. 🙂

Nikon D90| Nikkor 17-35mm @ 32mm| f11| 1/15 sec| ISO 400| Aperture Priority| On a Tripod