Quite pleased

DAY 5 - MORMON ROCKS AT SUNSET

Mormon Rocks at sunset

While the sun was dropped behind Circle Mountain and the lingering clouds helped the sky turn pink and orange, I couldn’t sit there and got carried away by the thoughts. The colors that completely flooded the earth were so soft and yet vivid.

I found this lonesome wild plant in the company of the tiny yellow flowers dotted around it. And this time, I decided to do rack focus on both the foreground and the background.

This is a shot completed with two sets of 5 different exposures first, then two HDR shots that Lightroom Classic CC created from those for me. Then in Photoshop I stacked the two HDR shots with two shots from the original two sets that contained all the details of the sky and the plant and the little flowers. The final edit was done back in Lightroom Classic CC.

I really liked how the overall color scheme came about, and so much so, I even created a preset from the final edit and named it Desert Sunset. It’s always time consuming to do rack focus stacking, and don’t forget that it all begins out in the field, but it’s the best way to preserve all the details of a scene across the entire frame.

And I am quite pleased with how it turned out.

Mormon Rocks, Cajon Pass, CA
Read less