Wildfire Skies

Field Notes IV.XXVII: Re-editing a photograph from the Joyce Kilmer Wilderness in 2023

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Mid summer. Without a doubt my least favorite time of year in Georgia. The heat advisory indicates that it feels like 108 degrees. We’ve had rain, but that just means that when it’s not raining the humidity is suffocating. I went grocery shopping the other day and just the effort of walking across the parking lot left me lethargic for the rest of the afternoon.

This is the doldrums. Too miserable to spend time outside, but stir crazy in the house. It’s hard to think about backpacking right now, even if it were to escape to the relatively cooler rivers or mountains to the north. The sultriness has made me apathetic.

I’ve seen chatter online over the past few days about Canadian wildfires. People are sharing images of hazy orange skies. This led me to think back on a trip I took to the Joyce Kilmer Wilderness area back in late August of 2023. It was an attempt to climb to elevation to escape the heat of late summer, though I don’t remember it being nearly as hot as now.

Though I didn’t think about it before going on the trip, Canadian wildfires were in the news then, too. I spent the second night in Joyce Kilmer at a rocky prominence called The Hangover. That evening as the sun was setting I made a panoramic photo of three separate images, combined in post processing.

While barricaded inside with the air conditioning, I thought it might be interesting to re-visit, and re-work, that scene.

Original

Above is the original panorama photo that I made. Almost three years later now, I cannot remember the steps I took to edit it. Looking at it now, I see that it could easily be cropped. There is a lot of uninteresting dead space in the landscape and the sky on each end. Unfortunately I cannot go back and change the camera angle, though, because the only foreground of interest is also in that dead space on the edges.

There is also a lot of blue in the image. Maybe it’s not too much blue, but it is just in the wrong places.

And finally, though the what foreground I captured stands out, the light on the mountains in the middle distance looks very flat. Let’s see what I would do differently today.

First Re-edit

The above image is my first re-edit of the pano. I took the RAW images, stitched them together, and edited it from scratch. It aligns much more with the way I currently edit my landscape photos.

I cropped away the dead space on the ends of the image. The intensity of blue is reduced and I tried to keep the entire color palate more natural. I then used masks to try to bring out some of the light on the middle distance hills to make the whole scene a bit more dynamic.

But perhaps I can still make it more interesting, without getting too crazy?

Second Re-edit

I did not like that the first re-edit didn’t include much of a foreground. In this second re-edit I shifted the crop all the way to the right to catch the stones an bushes in the bottom right edge. It’s not much of a foreground, but the best of what was available. This also put the setting sun right at the left third of the image, which gives the overall picture balance.

I color graded this edit. Nothing wild, but tilted the shadows to blue and the highlights and mid tones to yellowish orange. I think the end result shows the warmth of the wildfire clouds while displacing the blue of the original edit. It reduces the intensity of the blue and moves it from the sky to the mountains in the distance.

Finally, I used more masks to bring up the exposure of the hills in the middle distance. Even more than in the first re-edit. I believe the first thing that draws the eye in this picture is the sun at the upper left. But from there, the eye can now travel through this illuminated middle distance and come to rest at the bushes and rocks in the foreground on the right.

A comment I often hear is that people want their photographs to appear natural. Like what the scene actually looked like at the time. But here’s the thing- they won’t. Every image taken by every camera is an approximation of what the human eye can see. The human eye has a greater capacity to see simultaneously the darkest shadows and the brightest of highlights than any camera in existence.

On top of that we need to factor in the human experience. Our emotional states, experiences, and recollections contribute greatly to how we visualize a scene in the moment. And, how we then burn it into our memory.

A standard digital photograph is rendered as a jpg file. That means the data that was collected by the camera sensor is already rendered somewhat to give a compressed and ‘best of’ version of the collected data.

Most aspirational photographers, however, take digital photos as RAW files. These files include all of the available light data at the moment of capture. And while they often appear quite flat out of the camera, these files offer much more flexibility to work with in post processing due to the amount of data in them.

When I take a photo in the field, I think of it as such. I look at the land. I recognize how I feel and relate to the scene before me. With the camera I then capture digital information about the light. I am not trying to make a great photo in a RAW file, but instead I am trying to capture the maximal amount of data about the light that I can.

Post processing of a RAW file is where artistry lies. Some may say this is manipulating an image to look unrealistically better. My opinion is that processing is my opportunity to craft the data that I actually captured in the moment. I don’t add anything that wasn’t there. I adjust and manipulate the information in the file in a way that represents my human memory of the experience and feeling of the scene.

Can we get philosophical with this? Just as a digital camera captures information about light, perhaps human experiences are essentially the capturing of data about life and how it works? Maybe it is then up to us to post process those experiences through introspection and philosophical inquiry?

If we take it as a whole, just accepting whatever life hands us, the experience may be flat, one dimensional, and boring. But by crafting our lives through the assent we give to what we choose to value and the actions we undertake based on this, perhaps we can make our lives as vivid as wildfire skies.

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