Borrowing From A Friend’s Bag Of Tricks

It would be an quite the understatement to say I was fired up to photograph the Vista House from the Women’s Forum overlook in the Columbia River Gorge. Of the images I wanted to shoot on our recent ‘North by Northwest Photo Jamboree’, this was one of the top three. We had a big night of shooting the previous day, and I didn’t get to bed until about 2am. Needless to say, we all missed the sunrise. Actually, by the time we got here it was closing in on noon. Not the ideal time to be making iconic images. It was hazy non-dimensional light…and I didn’t have the luxury of an IR camera like my buddies Dave and Scott did; which left me wanting. Without warning, my muse tapped me on the shoulder. I remembered a photo buddy of ours, Brian Matiash, had posted an awesome image of this place a couple weeks before. It was a unique image that blended fantasy and reality. So, instead of hanging my head and pouting in the haze, I decided to try my hand at it by borrowing something from Brian’s bag of tricks. Brian saved the day! I owe you one next time we hit up ‘Hair Of The Dog‘.

Click Here to see Brian’s image that inspired me to push on.

Photographer’s Note: Because Brian is the Edu Manager at onOneSoftware, I decided to pay tribute to him by using his toolset. After I processed the RAW in Lightroom 4 I applied the Autumn filter from the Perfect Effects suite globally to the image followed by selectively applying the Raw Hide texture filter to the background. After that, it was back in to Photoshop where I selectively applied a 6px Gaussian blur to the background. Yep, you can save yourself some money anytime you buy an onOne product by using the coupon codeLIGHTASMAGIC. It’s good stuff, I use it all the time.