In early August several buddies and I backpacked into Cowlitz Park on Mt. Rainier for a long weekend. The flowers were thick and the vistas spectacular, and the weather even cooperated a time or two.
Our first night in Cowlitz Park we set up camp near a tarn, and after scouting for a few hours I settled on a composition with a lupine foreground. I went back to the location in late afternoon hoping to catch a sun star against Mt. Rainier, as insurance in case sunset was a dud. When I arrived though, I found the sun had already set behind a foreground ridge and my flowers were in shadow. I kicked back and enjoyed the beauty for a while, hopeful as the light got a bit more interesting that sunset might work out. Just as things started to get a bit more interesting, mist came pouring into the scene and I found myself sitting in thick fog. Grumbling under my breath about the unfairness of it all (to quote Jud from the BBC television show Poldark, “Tisn’t right, tisn’t fit, tisn’t fair, tisn’t proper!”), I packed up and headed back to camp to start supper.
Just as I started to eat, the fog cleared and the sky color started to look promising. For a moment I considered dashing back down the hill, but the lupine was a distance away and I knew there wasn’t time to get there and get set up before the show was over. (Tisn’t right, tisn’t fit, tisn’t fair, tisn’t proper!”)
However when scouting I had also poked around a lot of other possible compositions, and one I had considered was this patch of Pink Mountain-heath. It was only about 50 yards down the slope from camp, so I set supper aside and rushed down to set up this composition. …then, in a flash, the fog rolled back in. With a sigh (and a few more “tisn’ts”), I walked back up and started eating again.
I was starting to catch on though, and left the camera and tripod set up. It turns out that the clouds rapidly lifting and falling at that elevation would be a common theme for the entire weekend. It wasn’t long until they started to slide away again, and I once again set aside my food and went back to take this picture. I also was able to take some without any of the fog, but I actually preferred this one with a bit mixed in for the mood it gave the mountain.
I’m loving the Fuji-film X-T30 for its light weight. (For backpacking I combine it with the Sirui T-025x tripod, which is a great compromise of stability and weight.) I’m especially enamored with the focus bracketing, and used it to take eight images of the foreground for focus blending. The background is an additional image, bracketed to capture the highlights in the sky. I’m playing with the trial version of Helicon Focus, and used it to stack the images. I have no idea what I’m doing with Helicon Focus yet, but it seemed to survive my innocence and did a great job with the focus blending. In other news, I cloned out a few small plant bits that I found distracting, used lens correction to make the mountain a little larger in relation to the foreground, and puppet warped the two trees in the upper left to lean less.
If you’ve made it this far, any and all thoughts are always welcome. I’d especially appreciate feedback on the color. I found it to be an interesting mix of pink and yellow (thus the title), and a pretty colorful scene. Does the color mix look okay to you? How about the saturation?
FUJIFILM X-T30
FUJIFILM XF 10-24mm F4 at 10 mm (15 mm equivalent)
1.0 sec. at f/16.0 and ISO 800 (foreground images) and ISO 160 (background)
Based on the recommendations below, here’s a version with @Michael_Rung’s suggestions addressed, and the flower brightened a bit. Thanks for the feedback all!
. All of the blending and stacking looks good to my eye. Superbly crafted image IMO 
The colors look great to me, and I’m loving that pinkish misty background! I would’ve completely skipped a dinner for this if I had to.