Rainy Day Mist

Posted by Don Smith (California, United States) on 7 March 2009 in Landscape & Rural.

While on the final day of a recently completed Yosemite workshop, the rains settled into the Valley. Unfortunately the Valley floor is only 4,000 feet in elevation and often times warm southerly Pacific storms bring snow only to the higher elevations.

However, as a landscape photographer, this is where the fun begins. We had a hearty group who wanted to be "out in the elements" and all were rewarded with some stunning photo opportunities. Such was the case with this image captured from the famed Tunnel View parking area. Rising mist made for a tantalizing image of Bridalveil Falls (often times obscured in clouds and mist).

When processing an image in conditions such as this, a photographer really has to trust his or her own judgment as to how much contrast the image should have. The old maxim of setting a white and black point can often times be ignored as misty weather really doesn't allow for either. Histograms tend to fall somewhere in the middle. I basically played with the Curves adjustment in Photoshop until this image "felt right." There wasn't this much contrast present, but adding contrast to this image created more impact!

Trust your intuition when processing images such as these - it's your art and your vision. Throw the rules and numbers away, they simply don't apply in images such as this. We all have a visual impression of a scene we have photographed before ever seeing the results. With the immediacy of digital, we can oftentimes change the look of the scene at capture with the help of polarizer and split-grad filters. The process continues in post with RAW conversion and localized tweaks in Photoshop. This is what Ansel Adams use to refer to as "seeing the image in the mind's eye."

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