It made at the Snoqualmie Pass summit around midnight in mid January. The mountains were alive from the moon, which is out of frame on the right, and the lights from an active ski slope directly behind the giant snow pile on which I perched with my tripod. I’ve been studying Ansel Adams work lately, experimenting with black and white, and becoming ever fonder of what it can produce. I have not focused a lot of B&W in the past, but I’m finding it can be very compelling. When color is taken away, many distractions go with it. The monochromatic world becomes one of lines, shapes and textures that the eye can dance across like a princess in a ballroom. I also made a variation of this scene in color. Both were beautiful and it was a hard choice but in the end I really felt monotone made this something special.
I spent hours doing subtle tweaks to this. It was actually a panorama of the scene, but I ended up cropping the ends. It might of been easier had I started with a single frame, but my original vision was a panoramic multi bracket night HDR. That turned out to be the wrong approach. The extra width was distracting and in this case a multi-image HDR made the scene feel washed out and over processed. I decided to work the dynamic range from a single file.
