Black and white conversions of snowy landscapes

I was rummaging through old material in Lightroom recently and I noticed some shots from an awesome multihut ski trip I did a few years ago (2008) with some friends. I wrote then about it on my blog and my friend Teresa actually made a writeup of that trip at that time here, where you can see some of the very few photographs that ever got made of me (elusive guy). I am in the red wind shell most of the time in the pictures from Teresa.

Anyway, I noticed that I never got around stitching several multi-image shots I made back then. For weight I was carrying my old Nikon D50 with the kit lens and I did not bring a tripod (more booze could be packed this way). In some cases I was doing handheld multishot panoramas to create higher resolution landscapes. If you do this right, they can still be stitched well even though you might have to do a little touch up afterwards. I worked up a few of these lost landscapes and below I'll post some. I am most focusing here on the aspect of black and white conversion as I noticed that this really works well with some of these. For example, this shot from the front of the Goodwin/Greene hut was captured around sunset. The sun was coming through a thin cloud of snow crystals and generated this absolutely gorgeous light. I cannot believe I never stitched this image.


5 shots using a Nikon D50, 18-55mm kit lense at 18mm, ISO 200, f/10, 1/320s. Assembled in hugin. Pretty much as shot - no nasty HDR. Buy a print

This image really has to be seen large, which you can if you click on the link. To get back here use your browser's back button.

I converted this to black and white in Lightroom simulating a light red filter which again has to be seen large.

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Another new image that I really like is this panorama of our group coming up on a pass, rising out of a foggy valley.

5 images from a Nikon D50, 18-55mm kit lens at 30 mm, ISO 200, f/11, 1/500s. Buy a print

In the same place, but looking in the other direction, I took this image:

6 images from Nikon D50, 18-55mm kit lens at 24mm, ISO 200, f/11, 1/500s. Buy a print.
At the moment, my blog's banner has another version of this image that was taken a few minutes later after the clouds on Castle and Cathedral peaks cleared up a little. This cloudy view is also quite nice and will print really nice large for on your wall ;-)

I have several more images waiting to be born in my library from this trip. We'll see when I get to them. I still have a gigantic backlog to deal with with some very nice images in them too that I haven't spoken about yet. I have a little picasa gallery of new snowy black and white conversions here.

Difficult Creek hot springs

Dawn at the Goodwin/Greene hut:

One of the fun things about the 10th mountain huts is that they all have log books where people write about their adventures. Some go back many decades. The ones in the Goodwin/Greene hut went back to the 60's. There were many references in it to so-called Difficult Creek hot springs and many mentions of people fruitlessly trying to find them (ref my previous post). Even on the web you can find ample reference to them. This sort of mythology is great. No mention exists of the hot springs on the topomaps of this place, making the enticement even higher of finding them. Geologically, it is very well possible that there could be hot springs in that area as many hot springs exist all around there. However, they are not in the place that is mentioned in the dog-eared logbook page. The GPS coordinates given there are in another part of the state. I won't tell you whether there actually are any there though as I don't want to kill the myth and the woods below the hut of Difficult Creek drainage are a great ski.

Here is Doug reading about the hot springs and the mermaids that live in them and Teresa reading Erin's (who also highly recommends the springs) entry from years ago.

The view from the hut. As you can see lots of snow. While we were there the windows filled up even further.