827 - A Million Miles Away

Oh dear, it’s the middle of the night again. Once you have a rhythm, it’s hard to get off it 🙂

You know, I really try hard to provide you with fresh images, to shoot daily, to always find something new, and there are days when it’s easy. On other days everything in me writhes at the pure thought to go out. This was such a day. We had high fog and the light was so incredibly drab, it was disgusting.

I slept long, skipped breakfast as being pointless, did some shopping at the local super market, in other words, I did what I could to avoid going shooting, but finally, about an hour before the time of a theoretical sundown, I took my gear and drove up Mount Dobratsch. I knew that there would be sun at the summit, but I also knew that I would be too late for the 1.5 hours march up from the end of the street, thus it was a bit of a gamble.

When I finally got out of the fog, it was at a height of about 1200 meters and suddenly I felt like a million miles away from home. The sun was already setting, but there was blue sky and glittering sunlight on bright snow.

The first time I stopped, the sun was still out and lighting the trees on the rim. I put on my moon boots that I always have in the car and probed my way through the snow. Thankfully it has not snowed much in the last weeks, thus the snow has already compacted. After the big snowfalls I would have sunk in in a second. I know, it happened to me, and it’s a funny feeling to stand in deep snow up to your chest, not knowing if and how you’ll get out without help 🙂

Anyway. I took some pictures and then drove on to my final destination, a lookout platform reaching out from the cliffs where the mountain broke apart in 1348, at a height of 1400 meters. You better don’t suffer from vertigo when you stand on the platform, nothing but a metal grate between you and the rocks some hundreds of meters below.

There I watched the sundown, together with some other people, but of course everybody had left when I shot these last images.

I set the camera to high-speed continuous shooting (not that that’s really fast on a D300 when shooting 14 bit RAW), bracketing of five frames with 1 exposure value distance, and made some exposure series. I had my tripod with me, but did not bother to use it. Current HDR programs have quite nifty algorithms to automatically align images. These two samples were made with Essential HDR. I really like their Detail Enhancer tone mapping algorithm, but I could as well have used Photomatix Pro. They are both top notch, and I take the result always to Photoshop anyway.

The Song of the Day is “A Million Miles Away” from David Byrne’s 1992 album “Uh-Oh”. Hear it on YouTube.