We got up at 4 a.m. in the hope of catching a fabulous sunrise looking up the Gorge. No sunrise, but not bad. (This was a 5 shot bracket processed in HDR. Somehow my camera got accidentally set to jpg, but it seemed to work out fine.)
@Michael Rawluk: You're right. I went back and gave it a bit of increase in structure and sharpening, but I think that the fact that the shots were jpgs might have affected the HDR engine. You might go back and take a look. It's better but still not worth a print.
@Dulcie: I went back and sharpened it up a bit.
@Judy: There was a huge differential between the sky and the land. I tried double processing it, and it looked terrible. I don't think that there was a one single shot (and I took tons) that I could have made look decent. (I did go back and sharpen up the original HDR image a bit.)
@bluechameleon: A down side of approaching the Solstice.
@❀ Yvonne Simons ❀: If it hadn't been a workshop, you wouldn't have found me up there at that hour :))
@Bettina: I wasn't about to be the only person in the workshop who slept in.
@PD: It was a Rod Barbee Waterfalls Workshop that spent time in the Columbia Gorge and then in Silver Falls State Park.
@Diane Schuller: I don't think that it has an HDR "look."
@Xerophytes: This was processed in CS5. Unfortunately my camera was accidentally set to take jpgs (not good for HDR). I see this as an "impressionistic" image.
@Gary Hart: Thanks, Gary. I had all sorts of problems with this photograph. Some of them were due to my camera accidentally being set to take jpgs rather than RAW. Part of my goal was to say that if you don't get the conditions you had hoped, you have two basic options; one is to pack it in; the other is the figure out a way to get something half-way satisfactory. I wouldn't print this and put it up on my wall, but it does convey something of a sense of the Gorge on that morning. To some degree, I cop out by calling it an "impressionistic" photograph of the Gorge.
@Susan: I was in a Monet mood.