Sun Rays on Yosemite Valley

When we arrive the next morning, it was just thick enough to reach the tree tops, creating some nice photographic opportunities.

There had been several dozen people at this viewpoint minutes before the sun rays appeared, but once the sun cleared the mountains, nearly everyone decided to go get breakfast. Someone in our group asked about that, but I said “Let’s give it another five minutes.” Sure enough, when the sun closed the gap in the clouds and started shining down between them, light rays started moving around the Valley.

The dynamic range of the scene was too great for one exposure, so the sun ray image above was created from five bracketed exposures, adjusted in Lightroom 5.7 and combined in Photomatix 6 (beta 2) HDR software.

For comparison, I produced a quick field edit of an adjacent sequence using Photomatix 5.  I like the image produced with the newer software better, but the old one still became my most popular posts on Twitter!

It was also one of my most popular posts on Instagram, and posted to my Facebook Page it has received over 22,000 views so far.  I don’t spend much time on social media any more since most sites are moving to more of a “pay to play” model that price small businesses out, but it’s fun to see those rare occasions when an image breaks through the algorithms and actually gets seen.

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