Wednesday, August 5, 2026
OK, so I said that I might be back here depending on how this photo turned out. As you can see, here I am. It took me a while to work through the processing and there was a bit of a hiccup along the way which added some time. The ironic thing was I ended up just going with the pano that I built for the client to become mine, so what you are going to see in this blog is quite literally two different edits on the same image file. That makes this blog a bit more interesting I think which I why I have decided to go ahead and do it this way rather than just posting the photo that I prefer and that will be a part of my portfolio.
I’ve kind of talked around how this all happened, but I think that it is worth getting into some detail about since doing commissioned work is part of what I offer. While kind of unique in what I was doing, this is a really good example of how the process can go. If this is something that I can help you out with, I am more than happy to talk through the project and see if we can make it work.
It all started on Monday which was a rather disjointed kind of day. It started out simple enough with watching Sierra do the service on her car. After a good long time of working with her to do her own service work, she is pretty well capable of doing it all herself now. I’m just there to make sure nothing gets missed. For those interested, at 22 years old, she has successfully put her CRV up on jack stands, changed the oil and filter, rotated the tires, and changed the rear differential gear oil. Of course, she has also checked all the other bits and bobs that she is supposed to look at while doing a service. I’m quite proud of her for asking to take this on and then committing to learning how it all works.
After we were done with her car, we went out to lunch with Toni for a bit of family time before Sierra drove back home. I accidentally left my phone in the garage which was no big deal since my watch will act as the phone when I am not around the cell. It worked out pretty well because when we got back home, while I was walking down to the mailbox to check the mail, my watch rang. Figuring it was a spam call; I went ahead and answered it knowing that the reception at the bottom of the driveway was kind of spotty at best. From what I could gather in listening to the person on the other end, it sounded like a legitimate call for some photography work. I ran back up the hill to get my phone which was behind a locked door to the garage. In that time, I dropped the call on my watch and was unable to get it back on the phone. Not wanting to miss out on a job, I called the person back and apologized for the inconvenience in getting in touch with me.
From there, we were able to talk more about the project. As it turned out, James was with a company that was based out of state and was working on a project for a local high school. Ironically, this school was the one that was about a mile and a half from the house. He said that he had been looking for a photo of Rendezvous Mountain for this project which would be the background on a wall within the school. He showed me an AI mockup of the design that was planned which really helped me visualize the idea. The photo was going to be black and white and toned not to be a distraction to the school mascot which would be in full color. There would be a television monitor mounted on the wall in the center. The photo was just a background for the entire wall. The problem that James was running into was that the wall was 9ft tall by 18ft wide and he wasn’t able to find a stock image that was high enough resolution to print the size that he needed.
That was what prompted him to try and source a photographer, and he looked for ones in the area. I don’t think that he could have gotten a photographer any closer since I was maybe two miles from Rendezvous Mountain State Park. I was pretty much in the middle of the school and the location that they wanted photographed. Of course, I am sure that this is why they were looking for a photo of that particular mountain.
After talking with James for a while, I felt comfortable that I would be able to get the photo shot for him. The only catch was that he was needing it done within the week. Looking ahead at the weather, the rest of the week was looking to be rainy and cloudy. I was really looking for a featureless sky that would render white while the mountains took up most of the visual space. That was going to make it difficult to capture, and my second issue was I really had no idea how to identify the particular mountain that I was needing to capture. Of course, I knew where the park was, but looking at a distance and knowing what I was seeing was something that I had never done. James did mention that he had talked with one of the rangers there and found out where the best view of the mountain was. He shared that information with me and as it turned out, it was on a road that I have driven many times and even seen the view. I just didn’t recognize it for what it was.
I now had the location figured out, and I knew how I was going to shoot the scene. Because it was going to be such a large wall, there was no way around having to do this as a panorama. I needed all the extra resolution that I could get out of the image so that it could stretch to 18ft wide which is the largest image that I have ever produced. The ratio of 2:1 was a little disheartening though because that is just barely a panoramic image. I wasn’t going to be able to stitch too many frames together to get to the size that I was needing while sticking with the aspect ratio. Of course, I knew that the problems that I was having were insignificant compared to trying to find an image of this view specifically that would fit the wall as needed. At least I was going to be making the photo from the ground up to serve that purpose. I just needed to figure out the day that would work.
Since I had already decided that I wanted a clear sky day for the least amount of detail in the sky, I was looking for a clear morning. Since I would be aiming to the North, Northwest, I was wanting the sunlight to rake across the right side of the frame. In order for the sun to get over the mountains and into position, I was looking at something between 9:30 and 10:30am. I wasn’t able to do anything the next morning because I had a family photo shoot scheduled which meant that Thursday was going to be the only day that had potentially clear skies. That was kind of pushing it in my opinion.
As it turned out, my client never did confirm the family portraits which left me wanting to go out and get some photos and burn that creative energy on Tuesday morning. You can read about how that morning went by checking out this blog entry. While it was a successful trek, I didn’t get the client taken care of which was kind of a bummer. Looking at Wednesday, the clouds were going to be lower than they had been on Tuesday which meant that I wasn’t going to be able to do anything with the scene during the morning. I wasn’t upset because I didn’t think that clouds at the thickness I would need them would allow for good enough light on the mountain anyway. With the clouds that were in the forecast, I did get to thinking about waterfalls. That was what I ended up doing and figured that while the sun was coming out during the middle of the day, I would see if I could at least get an attempt at an image for James.
Since the spot wasn’t even two miles from the house, it was nothing to swing by to check it out. When I got there, I saw something that actually caught my attention for the first time. In all of the times that I have been by here and now that I have started to actively look at this as a photograph, I have yet to see it as a particularly pretty location. This was one of the problems that I had with the idea of doing this as a commissioned work. I just wasn’t all that interested in the scene. However, now that I was looking at it under what was really a quite interesting sky, I decided that it was at least worth a few attempts at a photo to see if the composition that I had in mind would even work for the size of the space that I was needing to fill.
I pulled off on the side of the road which was precarious in its own right since there was barely enough shoulder to get the truck out of the road before hitting the fence that was on the edge of the pasture. There was just really no good way to get safely off the road, so I was happy that this was not a highly traveled road during the middle of the day. I was much more likely to run into a tractor than a car.
I already knew that the lens of choice was going to be the telephoto lens because of the distance to the mountain. I thought about using a polarizer, but I could actually see the difference in blue tones in the sky with my naked eye and the polarizer would accentuate that division of tones even more. For simplicity, I decided to go with no filters which would allow a faster shutter speed as well.
I had picked out three different spots that I was wanting to try the pano from to get some different angles on the different curves of the mountain. I still wasn’t sure which one of these ridges was the actual mountain that I was here to photograph, but with all of my research, I knew that this was the spot and I had an idea of the area of focus for the client. Once I had the tripod all leveled and had done a dry sweep with the camera to make sure that it stayed level through the entire sweep, I was ready to start making exposures. With the lens zoomed into around 155mm, I found that I was needing a lot of images to build up the composition that I was seeing. In fact, it was taking eleven to twelve frames to stretch through the entire scene.
You might be asking why I was shooting so many frames when I was only looking to get a 2:1 aspect ratio which would usually mean around three vertical frames would be all that was needed. Well, I was seeing a full composition in front of me and that was how I am programed to shoot. I would just pick out a 2:1 crop within the entire photo for the wall. In order to get the entire scene in that ratio would mean including too much sky, or too much of the pasture that I was standing next to. Either of these options would have diminished the impact from the actual subject and not fit with the ideas of the design team I was working with.
When I got around to the last spot that I wanted to try, I had to elevate the camera to nearly the top of the extended neck of the tripod. This made for a very unstable platform to shoot from which was going to be exaggerated by my constant rotating of the camera. With the clouds moving, I didn’t have the luxury of waiting for five to ten seconds after getting the camera moved into position for the next frame so that the vibrations would stop. I was doing the best that I could keeping the camera from shaking too much, but I figured that this would be a good opportunity to use the image stabilization which I usually don’t use on a tripod.
I did two sweeps of the scene with the IS activated with the hopes of keeping thing tack sharp. Knowing that without having vibrations, the IS could actually introduce vibrations into the camera as it looked for something to correct. Just in case, I decided to do one last run with the IS turned off and made a point to count to two after my hands came off the camera before pressing the shutter remote. These had all been twelve images from left to right, so it took some time to get the entire image captured. I still didn’t know if what I had would work or not.
Ironically, during my time working on getting the images captured, I heard from James who was wanting to get an invoice to make sure that I got paid for the work. We got all of that figured out while I was actually shooting his project. I told him that if I was lucky, I would have a proof for him to look at later in the afternoon. Of course, I also knew that I was now looking at around 200 frames that had been captured for the day. It was going to be a long afternoon of processing and prepping a very large pano for review.
That was the first thing that I did when I got home. There were many more photos of the mountain than I had thought, but I did take multiple attempts from every location because the light on the mountain was in constant flux with the clouds moving overhead. I was able to eliminate many of the string of images because I could see that the exposure values changed between frames which would make for an awkward panorama that had stripes of light where the frames were joined together. The one that held the most promise was the last string of images that had some good shadows on the mountain, but the overall contrast looked to be right.
This is the one that I built together which took a while for the computer to build seeing as how each of these twelve images were 50mp in size. When it was all said and done, I really liked how it looked as a composition. The sky made it for me, but I also knew that the sky wasn’t going to be important for the client’s use so that became a waste within the image. I knew how I was going to go about processing the image, but I first had to come about a crop that I liked. This was the part that hurt me to the core. I was taking what I felt was a very successful composition and I reduced it to a snippet of the whole scene.
I centered on the focal point of the whole composition and hoped that was the part that they were wanting captured. Then it was a matter of converting it to black and white as requested and found a profile that kept the tonal values in line for a background image for the wall. The processing was finished up, and I uploaded a smaller sized proof for the client to review and decide on.
James was right there when I sent the proof over and within minutes, he was messaging me back that the photo had been approved and it was just what the client was looking for. At that point, I went in and made some final tweaks to the processing and polished it for the final upsizing. Once that was all done, I started the long process of saving the 2.5gig file and getting it put into Dropbox. This caused the computer to lock up twice and I had to recover from that before finally getting everything in place and sharing the folder with James.
I was very happy with the way that things had turned out from a business standpoint considering that the first contact for this commissioned shoot had been made in the early afternoon of Monday. In 48 hours from that point, I had captured the photo and within a few more hours had a final image delivered to the client. I had done my part and done it well within the timeframe that the client had laid out. This is how I like to do business and it is how I will conduct myself when you hire me for a job. There was still something that bothered me and I just couldn’t shake it.
I had set out knowing how the image was going to look and knew that it was not my typical style and would not necessarily fit the scene as an artistic representation of what I had seen. It was just a background and that wasn’t how I wanted my photos to appear. I had seen the full composition and found it to be much better than I had expected it to be. The final result was just less exciting to me, and I felt that I had shortchanged my vision for the scene.
There was nothing telling me that I couldn’t go and create an image that fit my view from the experience. I decided to build a one of the panos from the set that had the image stabilization to see if there was a difference in sharpness as part of my own processing. The pano built just fine and looked to be about the same as the one that I had built for the client. I started to go through it with some basic global tweaks and found that I really did like how it was looking. It was when I started getting into the details of it that I started to see where the camera had created motion blur in several of the frames. This actually surprised me a good deal because the image that was shot with no IS was actually very sharp throughout. This one had at least three frames that were blurred.
Not feeling like finding another alternate image to process, I just went in and made a virtual copy of the one that I had used for the client and then brought it back to the original form. From here, I applied the 4:1 aspect ratio crop to the image and used the same processing from the blurred image that I had started with. With a few more tweaks and a couple of local adjustments I had an image that I thought worked very well.
Considering that I had seen this scene many times and had yet to really find it worth shooting, I was looking at this pano and seeing it as a really quite successful composition. For me, the reaction that I had between the two images was completely different. I still didn’t really care for the client’s image, though this was not because it was bad. I just didn’t like it as a standalone photo, but as Toni kept reminding me, it was exactly what the client wanted which was what mattered. It was the comparison between these two executions of the same batch of RAW images that I started to find really interesting. It was a chance to showcase just how differently an image can look once it is processed.
They are both from the same group of images even though the client’s image is only a portion of the frame. Due to the wall size, the aspect ratio was totally locked in, and I had to fit the final image into that ratio which, in my opinion, didn’t fit the actual scene. Based on how I saw the scene, the right aspect ratio was the 4:1 that was used in my version. This gave room for the entire image to breathe and for the viewer to really be able to take it all in. A small detail that I liked about this was the addition of the road to the far left which gave scale to the scene and showed the depth between the line of trees and the field in front of the mountain. Thanks to the recent rains, the greens were showing slightly different hues rather than the dried up green that they have been showing for most of the summer.
A scene that I had not really liked enough to consider photographing before had taken on a new life when I was made to photograph it. I found the aspects of it that I liked and was able to create an image that I am really quite happy with. I’m even happier with it when compared to the client’s image which suited their needs perfectly but failed as a photograph in my opinion. The differences between these two images are beyond words and I thought that it would be interesting to see the differences and to hear a bit about why each photo was done the way that it was.
Which one is your favorite? Which would you like hanging on your wall? I think that this would make an excellent canvas print in someone’s house. The colors are calming and the sky adds just that pop of interest to keep the attention on the photo. Both of these photos are successful when you consider the purpose behind them. I do have to keep in mind that I have only been paid for one of them so far, and that one is not the one that I like, but that is fine by me. As long as the client is happy, I am too.
Until next time…
