There were no clouds there when we crawled into our tents to go to sleep. And no clouds throughout the starry night when I peaked out the flap of the tent. But sure enough in the morning there were clouds, banked all the way from the gorgeous Goat Rocks Wilderness, where we were backpacking, to Mt. Adams in the distance.

Much distance in light values, too, from the dark foreground to the sunlit background. I’ve been following some debate on the internet about the value of HDR (see here, for instance, at Scott Bourne’s photofocus blog). And it’s true– there’s some really bad, hypersaturated, noisy HDR out there. Much of it seems to aim at the look of a video game image. Which is fine if you like that kind of thing. I’m more interested in honoring the world as I see it. And rendering this scene as I saw it would have been nigh impossible without HDR.

The Goat Rocks Wilderness lies between Mt. Rainier and Mt. Adams in Washington. It’s a small range with a lot of orange rock, a wonderful anomaly in the Pacific Northwest, where black and gray volcanic rock predominates. It also has some dramatic broad, U-shaped, glacial valleys, far-flung flowerscapes, and mountain goats.

This is an HDR photo, taken early on an absolutely still morning after a night of merciless wind, steps away from my tent. I’m so pleased with the way the orange reflections in the water complement the bluish, shaded rocks.