Quartz Lake series, Glacier NP

[dwaugh]

It's been years since I've posted on this forum as I've been off adventuring keeping busy and shooting all along. I just returned home from spending the summer in Glacier National Park, Montana. I work on trail crew and spend at least half the days and nights of the summer in the backcountry. About a month ago we spent nine days at Quartz lake, and in that time I witnessed with my camera nearly every kind of weather/sky other than snow - I even managed to get a rainbow and the stars at night. I have plans to print a few of these shots for a small series for an upcoming show, but I don't plan to print them all. It may be obvious which ones I plan to print or not, but I'm not going to say which ones, and I'll let anyone say which numbers they like best (choose five or less). All critiques are welcome!

1.


2.


3.


4.


5.


6. (Have horizontal as well of the sunrise)


7.


8.



Thanks for looking!

[GB1]

Welcome back D, and congrats on your experience in the back country. I think this is an excellent 'series' showing how the same spot can look so different while plopped in the middle of a somewhat barren and inhospitable land. There just doesn't seem to be anything there to block the weather: sorta reminds me of Alaska when I was there a couple years ago (which was not as pretty as I expected it to be, but it certainly made an impression).

As for your shots, I like 1 and 3 the best, with 7 a definite keeper also. 6 needs a tad more space below the reflection. I am partial to blues so number 1 seems mesmerizing. It's the best one IMO, though I wish it was just a tad wider. I love number 3's color and unconventional formatting, which I personally think works really well. Number 4 is interesting, but I think that the sky needs to be darker. Perhaps you can do a little post processing and try that. Oh and number 2 is also nice.

Gb

[dwaugh]

It's very possible this is a better shot horizontal:



Thanks for the critiques. I believe that #1 was actually somewhere around 10-15mm, but looking more down. It was a stormy night, starting to rain on me. These photos go in order, actually, so #2 is the next morning when the storm was clearing. As for #4, I may have started shooting as soon as I had enough stars after dark, so over the 30 minute shot, give or take, the light glow in the sky was captured. I've had some very interesting and awesome results from glow over the horizon in the past... Also, I took stars three nights in a row. The first night was this shot (#4), the next two nights were my 35mm film, one better composed horizontal shot and one vertical, at 14mm. I hope to see that roll later this year, as it was begun last June and is only long exposure nights in the backcountry.

[Greg McCary]

I think you need to invest in some ND grads or some HDR software and fight the old dynamic range some. Get some more detail in those shadows.

[draymorton]

Beautiful location!

#1 is nice, but it's tilted ever-so-slightly to the left.

#2 - the sky is out of control and mountains too dark. ND and/or a little HDR might have helped. Looks like extremely tricky lighting.

#3 is very nice, though I might crop out the rocks in the foreground.

#4 is cool, but I might have zoomed in on the mountains. Or taken a longer exposure to get some detail in the darkest areas and blended that frame with this one.

#5 - I love the light on the mountains and the detail in the water, but a grad would have been the ticket here to control the exposure of the sky.

#6 I like this one better as a vertical, with a little less sky. The mountains at left and right are a little on the dark side, as well.

#7 is great, but I'd maybe like to see more water. Just my initial reaction. Very nice, though.

#8 - the sky is too bright in relationship to the mountains and in terms of the overall exposure. An ND grad would have really helped.

They are all nice shots. I'm just trying to offer suggestions for possible improvement.

And I agree with Greg about the ND (obviously) and HDR. Go the ND grad route first and try to get everything as close to what you want as possible instead of trying to fix a crappily-exposed shot in Photomatix (which never really works that well).

Oh, and my pics for printing would be 1, 4, 5, 7, and 8 (if you can either crop way into the sky or fix the exposure somehow).

Hope any of that helps!

[dwaugh]

I agree about the ND Grad filter, it's next on my buy list. The funny thing is, in the last two years I've become a master of HDR with some great results with a process I've created using a total of two or three free programs. I'll make a post with a few. However, as of about tow months ago I became sick of them and decided to try and go more puristic. Of course, something that could also be affecting these photos in a big way is the fact that right now I don't have a good RAW editor, so I haven't been able to do any exposure or curves editing in RAW on these. I'll be finding a new program and re-editing these to resize them before printing. I'll post the end results/new edits. Also, half these shots were taken very quickly, with no tripod setup, during breakfast or dinner...

As for #7, I wanted to see more of the sky than the water and with the framing at 10mm with distortion and all to account for, that was likely the better place to frame it, though I suppose a little lower wouldn't have hurt. To be honest, that was the best the rainbow got, and it didn't last for more than two or three shots with the fast moving clouds.

Here are a few different shots surrounding #5:
10. (continued numbers)


11.


12.


Critiques really do help! I thought it was obvious which ones I wasn't going to print, but now I'm being torn between a few of them for smaller shots. If it could work out, I would like to print three large and two smaller, three 12x18 and two 8x12 vertical to line up on a wall.