It’s Sunday night now and I write the entry for Saturday. Saturday afternoon I was out photographing for an hour, nothing special, only some wide-angle landscapes, but the really spectacular thing was, what I saw when I returned home.
Situations like these are really impossible to photograph. The dynamic range exceeds everything that sensors or film can record, yes, it exceeds even the range of the human eye. I had made two exposures, one with a completely burned out sky and a second with most of the sky intact, but everything else pretty lost in darkness.
The two exposures were from slightly different points of view and impossible to combine. I’ve decided to use the second one, the dark one. This is a 14 layer job with 8 distinct masks, but ultimately I think I made it. It’s pretty amazing what enormous reserves the RAW files of Nikon’s D300 have.
The Song of the Day is “Ray Of Light” from Madonna’s 1998 album of the same title. See the original video on YouTube.