I was insanely glad that I kept the original RAW file for this. The picture was taken in October, 2011 at Sibley State Park. My wife, Becky, and I had managed to get a camping weekend by ourselves and we couldn’t have had a better time than we did. It was beyond gorgeous that weekend and it was really nice to have a weekend alone to reconnect.
At the time, my friend, Jacob, was getting in HDR photography, as were a lot of people at the time and I got caught up in it as well. I look back on the photos I took and what I originally posted on this blog the first time, before I goofed when setting up WordPress on a new computer and ended up erasing all my data, and I can’t believe I posted some of the stuff that I did. They were BAD. Just the awful fake-looking cartoony HDR that everyone was doing back then. Thankfully, at the insistence of Jacob, I saved some (not all) of my NEF files and this was one. I had a chance last year to go back and reprocess the photo in RAW editor and it was nice to apply some of the stuff I’ve learned over the years to it.
