Photo of the Week - Rainfall on the Teton Range

Schwabachers Landing, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming

Once again, I am working down to the wire to prepare a photo and post it for a weekly visual treat for my readers. I simply do not understand how time flies so quickly. It seems like every day is shortchanged several hours. My latest Wyoming trip files are finally downloaded and organized into various file folders. Now I need to go through them all (over 5500), culling through and deleting those that don’t measure up.

Ah, enough of my senior grumbling.  You want to hear about this photo! It was taken at the southern portion of Schwabachers Landing. It is a floodplain area, and many boating enthusiasts access the Snake River at this location. The scenery is incredible, with the Teton mountain range providing a stunning backdrop. Understandably, the landing is quite popular for general tourists and photographers.

On the fall morning of my visit, the sun was ducking in and out of the storm clouds and a gentle rain was falling. The lighting was very tricky, with areas of dark shadows and bright highlights. The dynamic range of the lighting was far too great for a single exposure. With my camera mounted on a tripod, I captured several bracketed shots. 

To prepare the final photo, I selected and combined four images, all taken with different exposures, into a single image using special photo software. The combined image was far superior to a single photo image. However, but it contained some distracting cloud movement in the sky. So I “painted” in the sky from one of my original image files, in addition to performing my usual Photoshop tasks.

It was not a quick editing job, by any means. But it was worth it!