Paul's Minarets picture inspired me to dig into my archives and do some work on a shot I took last fall. I grew up on the east side of the southern Sierra Nevada and hiked, fished, and skied a lot in the mountains between Lone Pine and Mammoth. In high school I skied Mammoth 20-30 days per year, so the Minarets and Mts. Ritter and Banner were familiar sights. After an absence of more than a decade when I went back last fall and took a bunch of pictures.
The URLs below link to a composite made from two shots taken with my *ist-Ds and FA 77 Ltd lens hand-held at F/8. Man, that lens is sharp! The sky was an crisp, pure blue with no clouds--not exactly Ansel Adams' most favored condition for dramatic mountain scenes. To make things a little more interesting I went black and white with a real emphasis on red to darken the sky. The originals were taken RAW. The only other processing I did was to stitch the photos together with Photoshop and apply a little Smart Sharpen. Apologies in advance to those without 1280-pixel wide monitors. http://www.westerickson.net/mark/misc/MinaretsRitterBannerMedium.jpg The large is the full size version if you want to pixel peep. I don't think that the Bayer pattern de-mosiac algorithms do very well with really fine detail like pine needles. A Foveon sensor or dedicated black and white camera would have probably done much better... http://www.westerickson.net/mark/misc/MinaretsRitterBannerLarge.jpg --Mark -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
