Some autumn colors from Sweden. I was in the Stora Sjöfallet national park past weekend and made this shot of Mt. Akka in the early morning. Probably one week earlier would have been the peak in terms of colors, now many of the leaves had blown off the tree branches, and the colors are a bit brownish. I'm still pleased with the images I got there, and this later autumn palette is nice too.
If someone recognizes the shooting location from other pictures of mount Akka it's no coincidence; there are few places along the lake side that provides a nice foreground, this is one of the best locations and easy access to it as well, I'm standing only 300 meters from the road. You need to be there very early in the morning though to get light on the mountain.
I made shots during a 2 hour period at this location so I have shots with a sun-drenched mountain too, but I chose this one since the lighting is a bit less cliché
. I haven't decided if I like this foreground composition or not, in principle I like it but the very deep red leaves on the ground are attracting a lot of attention in the picture, maybe it's a bit too much. But now it's too late to change my mind anyway, until next year
Later on the day I hiked up on the mountain-side to scout a nice position for the evening light coming in from the west. I found a nice location but the weather was not on my side so I did not get any evening shot.
This shot was made with a Linhof Techno, Leaf Aptus 75 and a Schneider 47mm with a little bit of shift to bring up the horizon. Since the ground is sloping I did not use any tilt here but instead stopped down to f/16 to get sufficient depth of field.
During the shot I used a 2 stop hard edge gradient filter over the upper part of the image to get better foreground exposure. I recorded that on the LCC shot so I could cancel out and apply a new more precise tonemapping in post-processing. This is a technique I almost always use for landscape scenes with a sky these days. Thus I rarely have dynamic range issues, despite having a legacy back.
Processing is made in RawTherapee and a beta of a still unreleased tonemapping software (just to bring down the bright sky, but keep the realistic look), I have not put any huge efforts in the processing though, for a print I would probably add a bit more punch to it
(Stora Sjöfallet = Big Waterfall, but there's no waterfall there anymore since there's a power plant making electricity of the once great waterfall)
