Last weekend at Hyalite Canyon, I had the pleasure of starting ice season. The canyon is quite beautiful, but turned out to be difficult to photograph.
The climb I was photographing was in the shade while the opposite wall was in bright sun. When I would expose the foreground ice, the sky and mountains would be blown. But exposing the sky resulted in dark, noisy shadows of the trees and climber. I did not have a tripod with me, (nor would it have done any good as I was on rappel). I shot many bracketed frames to play around with in photoshop.
My first attempt was with two frames, one for the sky and another for the foreground, overlayed and masked. The problem with this method was alignment because they were shot handheld.
My second attempt was to make 2 conversions of the same frame and blend them. The foreground became unacceptably noisy in this case.
Another pressing issue is the uneven border between the light and dark areas; it is difficult to accurately mask off the trees.
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Does anyone know of tricks to solve these problems. Maybe software to align nearly identical frames or to clean up the noise. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks;
Phillip
