A Hike in The North Cascades, Washington State

In September of last year, I spent about 4 days in the North Cascades National Park in the great state of Washington.

I didn’t fully comprehend what it would mean to be there at the same time the Larch Trees would be at their full fall color change.

The Larch Tree is of the same family of the Tamarack tree. Meaning, that while it looks like a pine tree, which does not shed it’s leaves (needles), the Larch does in fact drop it’s leaves (needles) every fall. Not before however, they turn an incredibly bright shade of yellow.

It was an absolutely stunning display of color all across the Washington mountain range known as the Cascades.

An out of the way, lesser known national park, the North Cascades sits at the border of Canada in the state of Washington on the Pacific Coast.

After dropping Joelle off at the airport in Spokane, I headed up to this park for a few day not fully knowing what to expect.

I was not disappointed and in fact, wish I had spent a little more time in the area. It was amazing.

While there, I did do some photography at the Washington Pass overlook as well as taking a hike up the Maple Pass loop. I met a couple on the trail while hiking to Thunder Knob who enthusiastically filled me in on the Maple Pass Loop trail. They showed me a number of photographs from their hike up the range and I just knew I had to make that hike.

I did.

Not before I did some epic photography at the overlook.

On this morning, I opted to make a few changes in the way I would be photographing the range.

The mountain range is huge. The expanse to photograph is so large, it was impossible to capture even with my ultra wide angle Tokina 11mm lens.

I opted instead to photograph the range using the Panorama method. Meaning, I would take a series of photographs, each next to the other, that would later be stitched together in Lightroom.

This process involves selecting each of the photos when they are loaded into Lightroom and then selecting the “Create Panorama” option. Lightroom merges the photos together to create a single image making up the Panorama.

When shooting such an images, you will need a ball head allowing the camera to rotate on it’s axis along the horizon. After each shot the camera is rotate to the left or right (whichever direction you are shooting). Overlapping each of the images around 45-60% is appropriate to later provide the computer program enough data to stitch the images together successfully.

The result? An amazing image of the entire range. The view such that it mimics to a degree what your eye saw while there.

Another technique I used on this set up was to shoot what would be called an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image.

Similar to a Panorama, I took multiple images. The difference here is the camera will remain in the exact same position for each shot. The information to change will be instead the varying exposures. This is often referred to as “bracketing” or taking varying exposed images of the same scene.

In this case, the sky would expose at a much brighter light limit, than say, the tree line and the roadway below the mountain peaks being lit by the sun.

I decided I would bracket by 5. Meaning the photograph would start at perfect exposure. I would then have the camera take images underexposing the shot in two images on the down side of perfect. And then over exposing the image on the upside of the exposure in 2 images.

The underexposure would allow Lightroom to merge the sky in it’s underexposed state with the tree line in it’s overexposed state, ultimately taking the dynamic range of all 5 images and merging them together into one which beautifully exposes all the ranges in the photograph.

This is how you create both a beautiful Panoramic Photograph and then an HDR image.

Both of which are a great skill to learn and to have when photographing the challenging subject of landscape photography; in particular, that taking place at sunrise or sunset.

If you’d like to see the entire adventure, I’d love it if you would take a look at the video from the session, which you can see below.

Take care of yourself. I’ll be posting some serious Milky Way photography examples in the upcoming days. Be on the lookout! :-)