The Ultimate Guide to Digital Photography in the Mountains

Exposure

Light in the mountains is often very harsh, especially as altitude increases, as every climber who forgot to wear his sunglasses learned quickly. Snow is as reflective as things get, and there tends to be an awful lot of it. Add to the mix luminous clouds and dark patches of rock, and you have a perfect recipe for blowing out the dynamic range of any camera. For that reason, special care should be given to getting a correct exposure of every image - sometimes not an easy task.

Back in the days of early light meters, exposing for snow could be a little tricky, as it is far brighter than 18% gray. It used to be recommended to overexpose by 1 to 2 stops whenever a substantial portion of the frame was (sunlit) snow. Nowadays, however, matrix meters have gotten so good at recognizing those scenes that this is not needed at all anymore. The problem tends to be quite different: unless the whole image consists of objects tonally close to snow, in which case correct exposure will be achieved right away (as it should), the dynamic range of the scene is likely to largely exceed what the sensor can record, resulting in deep shadows and blown highlights. However, in most mountain scenes, the important stuff is pretty bright (snow texture and clouds) while the dark parts (rock patches, climbers) can usually be close to black without doing too much damage. Following that observation, I keep a -0.7 stop continually dialed in on my camera while climbing in the sun. That saves me a lot of clipping, and a good rule of thumb is that if there are no clouds in the frame, the exposure will be fine, especially with the option of raw recovery. Which of course doesn't mean that I shouldn't check the histogram, certainly a good habit to take for every shot.

If the highlights are still being clipped with -0.7, I keep dialing down by -0.7 increments. Once nothing is blown anymore, it's time to look at the shadows: if they are reasonably detailed, then I just leave it at that, usually keeping all the intermediary shots. If not, however, it is time to start bracketing for HDR. The formula is simple: you want 3 frames at +/-2 stops (I have yet to see a scene which doesn't fit in this range), such that the darkest image of the lot is -0.7 stop than the last image you obtained previously (the one correctly exposed for the highlights). In practice, it means adding 1.3 stop to whatever exposure compensation was previously on. I then simply take a hand-held 3 images burst in high-speed mode (4.5fps on the D90). Since a handful of pixels will be lost when aligning, it is a good idea to frame a bit wider than what is really wanted. One important thing to check is the sharpness of the brightest image, since it will have been taken with a significantly slower speed.

This is not an article about HDR, but suffice it be said that it doesn't have to look like the LSD trips one sees so often on flickr. By being quite conservative and using the HDR software only to recover details, it is possible to get very natural looking results, though it might take some practice. I think the investment is well worth the effort, however, as this is the only alternative to carrying ND grad filters (not really an option for climbing photography). I personally use Photoshop CS4 to align the images and Photomatix Pro to do the HDR generation and tone mapping.

IV. What to shoot

If you have managed to stay with me so far, you should by now have a fairly good idea of how to carry and operate your DSLR in the mountains. But an important point hasn't been discussed yet, and that is what to point the lens at.

Well, mountains. Duh. Or is the answer really that simple? I may be the biggest mountain lover you will ever meet, but few things bore me quicker than a slideshow of peak after peak which have been shot for no other reason than the fact that they were around. Good photography engages the viewer, and more, good climbing photography engages the non-climber viewer. If one can't somehow relate to the scene, then it will be no more than a picture of a big piece of rock.

I would put images from a mountaineering trip in two different categories: on one side, "pure" landscape images, where the scenery is the subject, and on the other "climbing images", where the goal is to show humans doing silly stuff to get to the summit.

Landscapes

Of course, entire volumes could be (and have been) written on the subject, and I don't claim to have the ultimate answer of what a good landscape image should be, but here are some things that you might find useful:

• You must have something to say with your images, just like in any other form of photography. For me, it usually is how majestic the mountains are, how small humans are in comparison or how inaccessible and inhospitable they can be. If you don't care, the viewer won't either.
• A good test to find out how interesting and engaging your image is likely to be is to try and describe it with words. If you can't say anything else than "it's a picture of a nice mountain", then you can pretty much delete it on the spot. Some examples of what to look for might be "it's a rough looking windswept vertical rock face that looks particularly hostile", "it's an alien looking snow formation whose shape is underlined by low directional light" or "three-dimensional clouds partially hiding a snow-covered summit".
• While climbing, you have the unique opportunity of being able to look down on other mountains. Use it to differentiate your photography from all the lemmings who stay in the valleys!
• Think about getting close with a tele-lens, to isolate details and get cleaner composition. Distances are usually pretty high, so shooting wide will often result in tiny looking humps.
• Snow and ice are among the most amazing things to photograph. They can form crazy overhanging sculptures that would shame Manhattan buildings or bottomless crevasses that would scare the bravest of us, and if you add directional light, the most exquisite curves and gradients.
• Clouds often make amazing pictures, especially if they are around the peaks themselves. Clear skies are nice for climbing but boring for photography.
• Panorama software are getting real good these days, and I have rarely had stitching problems from handheld shots. Just make sure to have a lot of extra space at the top and the bottom. Unless in a whiteout, a 360¬" summit panorama is pretty much an obligation.