Glorious early morning sun (and photography)

[Tweaked 24.x.19 to remove slider and stick with galleries for ‘photos.]

I was working yesterday morning.  It had been a lovely dawn but not that unusual but something caught my eye and I looked up to see an amazing rich salmon pink was colouring a set of clouds beyond Grand Assaly ahead.  I grabbed the camera and shot out onto the terrace but already the colour there had faded markedly, however, the sun exploding above the summit of Bellecôte and its little glacier was extraordinary.

The way we see, what brain gives us, with a bit a bit of pre-processing in the retina, is incredible.  We see both the intensity and the tones up in the sky where the light level is orders of magnitude that from the shadowed face of the mountain towards us.  The brain does an amazing job of intelligent post-processing so we see detail in all areas. 

I think it’s impossible for camera images to catch all that range so when we look at photos we don’t have the full information (actually of rather dubious photographic quality) that the eye gives the brain.  I could spend hours with an image editor and splice together the sky from one image at one exposure to get the depth of contrast there that I saw out on the terrace, splicing that with the slopes from another image at a different exposure that has the detail on the slopes.  However, I haven’t the time or skill for that, but also I don’t really want that to be my sort of photography. 

I can respect the skill and artistry of post-processing like that but I prefer that my images haven’t had that work and it seems to me that once you start working like that, then something is lost and someone looking at your best ‘photos never knows how much post-processing was involved in creating them.  When I look at ‘photos and feel unsure about that, something is lost for me. 

However, I just couldn’t throw all of these away (I did throw away others).  You have the original clouds up the valley, and the burst of sun behind the glacier. Here they are as a gallery, if you click on any image you should get the full image. The full images are large so may take a bit of time to come up on slow links (like mine!)

Oh, and you can see how fast the salmon pink ahead came and went in the timelapse video of the whole day. It’s hardly there at all (at 8 seconds between images and at 30 frames per second, i.e. 4 minutes compressed into a second). That whole video is pretty sensational too. Yesterday was a fine day visually.

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