Friday, May 22, 2015

Mt. Rainier Climbers

Spent an interesting day on the slopes of Mt. Rainier taking a crevasse rescue course from two guys, Zeb and Chase, who have probably climbed the mountain more times between the two of them than most of us walk to the store. As we were in the thick of setting anchors and the simulated saving of the lives of our companions, a group of climbers marching impossibly close to each other hiked by. I could have shot the scene with a wide angle setting but that would have pushed the mountain too far back and so would have lost some of its dramatic relationship to the group. So—as I've been doing lately in such cases—I went with a panorama which allowed me to get the same landscape format picture but with a tighter zoom (70mm, to be exact). Shooting in portrait format, I knocked off seven pictures, stitched them in Lightroom, cropped a little on the ends and called it a day. An added bonus to doing the picture this way is the incredible resolution and detail I got. At 100%, those crevasses on the mountain's glaciers are sharp and clear.