| After
a long day hiking and photographing with a friend in eastern Yosemite Valley
we were on our way home driving west just outside of the park along highway
120 when we rounded a corner and this wonderful sunset appeared before
us. I hoped for a pull out real soon to stop the car and photograph. Then
around the next corner was a nice paved pull out, I stopped the car and
began to hastily retrieve the camera gear from of the trunk of the car
and began setting up the tripod. I managed to get the camera mounted and
focused on the sunset in record time, all the while imagining the exposure
range of the sunset and the foreground mountains and the problem it presented
for me if I choose to try and record a slight amount of texture in the
foreground and still retain any useful detail in the sky. When I placed
the foreground mountains on an minimum exposure zone of II, I
soon came to the realization that the sky would fall somewhere at, and
well above the Zone XIV range, which at the time seemed like an extraordinary
amount of contraction which would have to occur in the development of the
negative. Mind you now, all during this rapid exposure determination the
sunset was also rapidly changing, so I opted for a quick exposure determination
based on the illuminace of the sky and placed the most extreme highlights
on a Zone VIII and let the foreground
mountains fall well below zone 0. I would of liked to have a very subtle
amount of detail in the foreground mountains, but at the time I really
did not want the sky to fall on such a high location on the exposure scale
without any positive means of contracting the development. All in all it
is still a nice image with the foreground mountains as a silhouette. |
