Denali Fall Color
For the past few years, it seems whenever I took a fall color trip – I was a bit early, or a bit late. The colors are always nice, but you miss that absolute peak time.
As I mentioned in my previous post, my Alaska trip started out in Cantwell – primarily for its closeness to Denali. (Thanks Doug). Since I have never been to Denali before, and certainly don’t know what it looks like week to week, I don’t know if this represents peak color or not. But man, if this isn’t peak, I think I would need to take some tranquilizers seeing it peak.
Denali National Park simply had some gorgeous scenery. It just wasn’t this particular view. Imagine spinning around 360 degrees and seeing this type of view.
We seemed to hit a good weather time as well. Temps in the 60s (deg. F) here, but this past week seems it is now hovering around freezing with snow starting.
This image is another 5 exposure blend, using Photomatix, some additional processing in Lightroom, and then to Photoshop for some adjustments with Luminosity Masks. I think the exposure blend combined with the luminosity masks added a lot of drama here – but certainly the clouds hugging the hillsides helped as well as the color of course. I was surprised by how many dust spots I had to clean out of the sky. I had just cleaned my camera’s sensor prior to this trip, and have come to the conclusion that Nikon’s sensor cleaning on the D700 isn’t worth much.
