After capturing the trees standing in the heavy fog, we made our way back to our room to let our dog rest and cool off. It was especially a good idea since there seemed to be some kind of race being held, and, since our dog can be a bit temperamental and is not always much of a people person, it was best to let the race end before we went out again.
Finally, the race ended, the racers and spectators left, and we headed out to explore two other nearby trails. The first trail was relatively short, but it had some steep stretches. By the time we completed it, the dog was hot, tired, and starting to move slowly.
We stopped at a small snack shop, got something to drink, and began making our way back to the room. However, my wife decided we should try the second trail. At first, it didn’t seem too bad, and we kept walking along. But, as we neared the end of it, it became very rocky, and our dog began having trouble navigating the sharp rocks. We turned around to head back to the lodge.
Within minutes of turning around, I discovered this area of wildflowers located just off the trail. The midday lighting created a great degree of contrast, so I photographed the scene with my phone so I would be able to come back later in the evening with my camera gear.
We returned to our room and rested while I waited for the sun to drop. Finally, after hours of waiting, I decided it was time to return to the wildflowers. I grabbed my equipment and headed out with my wife and dog following along. Of course, the dog had fully recovered and decided now was a great time to stop every three to four seconds to sniff some new discovery. So, while they stopped, I continued on hurriedly to get to the location.
When I reached the area of the wildflowers, I was surprised to see that the lighting was still somewhat contrasty but not like it had been, and it was certainly manageable. I set up several different compositions of the flowers, but I preferred this particular framing with the background tree trunk and the foreground serving as anchor points and providing an implied leading line.
When I got home and began processing the file, the first thing I did was crop the image. I photographed the scene using my camera’s native 3:2 aspect ratio, but that brought in too many distracting elements along the left and right edges of the frame, which I had expected to happen. Cropping the image to a 5:4 aspect ratio solved that issue nicely. Then, I increased contrast using Lightroom’s contrast slider and tweaked it further using whites, blacks, highlights, shadows sliders.
I wanted the image to look as if the scene was deep in the woods rather than right off a well used hiking trail, so I reduced overall exposure slightly. But the upper quarter of the frame was still pretty bright, but applying a linear gradient and reducing the exposure to that portion of the image gave me what I was looking for.
For finishing touches, I added a slight amount of texture and clarity, increased the vibrance to enhance the somewhat muted green, lavenders, and yellows, and added a slight vignette. Finally, I opened the image in Photoshop, I applied sharpening with Topaz Labs’ Sharpen AI to get to this final result.