Snow Canyon Overlook with Rugged Tree Hanging on Cliff
Snow Canyon Overlook with Tree in Foreground This entry will be about two things: blown highlights and finding the right foreground subject. Blown highlights are a photographers' worst nightmare. A blown highlight is just white, no color, no detail, no definition, nothing but white. You cannot create anything with it. Many cameras including mine have flashing red pixels on the LCD screen to alert you to blown highlights. When shooting, they are to be avoided. In processing the above photo, the subject is a darker object against a brighter background. This calls for processing to lighten the details in the tree while still keeping the detail in the brighter distant cliffs. There are ways to do this which look fake and I don't want that. Sometimes a photo will look more real, believable if you just let the highlights blow out, which is what I did here in the upper left corner of the photo. There is just white, not blue, sky. ...