Carl ProthmanI love how the mountain seemed to rise out of the low clouds while the fir branches and pinecones framed the scene. It felt like a classic Pacific Northwest view to me.
What catches your eye first here, the mountain or the trees and pinecones?
One thing I’ve learned photographing Mount Rainier.
The mountain decides when the photograph happens.
All we can really do is show up and wait.
Scott LairdSomehow I've always assumed that succulent plants were a "they're from somewhere else" thing, but I discovered that we have our own native varieties in the pacific northwest.
I'm pretty sure these are broadleaf stonecrop / sedum spathulifolium. They were growing on the side of a rock on the island in Deception Pass.
Some places invite you to stay a little longer.
This bench was facing one of those quiet views where the water, the light, and the open space all seemed to slow things down.
Every photograph quietly answers one question.
Why did this moment matter?
The camera records the scene.
But the photographer decides what was worth noticing.
What makes a moment matter enough to photograph?
Yesterday was a great day, photographically speaking, and I’m really happy with the results. Overjoyed, really. But I’ve been struggling with technical issues around sharing them. My camera is happiest producing HDR images, with more than 8 stops of available brightness and a much wider gamut than sRGB. All modern browsers can display HDR images and handle a wide variety of colorspaces. Almost all mobile devices (and a lot of non-mobile devices) can happily display HDR images.
So you can display HDR images on a webpage and expect reasonable results.
Unfortunately, actually getting those HDR images through random social networks and photo services (including FB, Mastodon, Reddit, Google Photos, and Immich) without getting the color butchered has proved to be *way* more complicated than I’d expected. It’s not just a matter of stripping color tags; there are some fun things happening under the hood.
Anyway, for now I’ve just posted my 8 favorites on my blog. After spending hours fighting trying to get FB and Mastodon to present something that looks even close to right, it’s refreshing to just thing images on a page and have them come out perfectly.
https://scottstuff.net/posts/2026/03/15/cascade-river-road-hdr/
I’ve got to say, I’m *loving* my new Hasselblad X2D II. It’s more fun than anything that I’ve shot with in years. And then, as a bonus, you’re left with amazing 100 MP images.
Cascade River Road in HDR
I’ve been on a bit of a HDR photographyTo be specific — I’m talking about modern HDR, where you produce images and video for displays that can display more than 8 stops of brightness, not the older multi-exposure/stacked HDR that was trendy a decade or so ago, where brighter areas of images were squashed to fit into the dynamic range of an older monitor. I’m specifically targetting displays like modern phones, tablets, and TV that can show brighter highlights and a wider range of colors than older displays. kick lately, now that I’ve realized that a lot of modern devices (almost everything Apple, almost everything Android, almost all 4K TVs, and many Windows systems) can support a wider color gamut and higher brightnesses than the 2000s-vintage displays that we’ve used as a standard for the past couple decades. I wrote about some of the technical issues a week or two ago, and now I’d like to share a few images and explain why I’m trying to make HDR images work ubiquitously online. I’ve been trying to share these images in the format that I want them to be seen for about 24 hours now, and just about every social media app has some problem with one or more of them.It’s not as simple as “HDR doesn’t work” — Facebook (for example) will show HDR images just fine, but it destroys the dynamic range of images posted in some formats and some color spaces. So Display P3 seems to work okay, but Rec. 2100 PQ doesn’t, even though anything that can deal with one should really be able to deal with either. I’m going to need to do some detailed testing and write this all up, hopefully before it all goes obsolete and I need to test it all again. So for now, I’m going to post them here and share links. Modern web browsers do a great job with HDR images and are happy to diplay almost anything that you throw at them. I got up early on Saturday to go take some landscape pictures. The weather in the Seattle area has been either raining or snowing for a couple weeks straight, but Saturday’s forecast finally called for a break, with a mix of rain, clouds, and sun across the area. When I woke up in the morning, my first choice of photography locations was forecast to get another half inch or rain, but my second choice looked like a mix of light snow and sun, so I decided to give it a shot. So, I headed out to the Cascade River Road in Marblemount, WA. I’ve driven through Marblemount on the way to the North Cascades, and I’ve always wondered what was up this way, but had never actually driven up the Cascade River Road. Technically, the road is marked as “closed” for the winter, but that’s really just the last few miles, leaving lots of room for photography.
Hopefully this comes across well enough here; in HDR on an 8k display it's kind of stunning. Crammed into a narrower brightness range it loses some of its impact but still keeps the frenetic quality of the water rushing through the rapids combined with the solidness of the snow-capped granite rocks.
Yesterday's Seattle-area snowstorm left a bit of snow on the fern moss.
Lots of tiny little waterfalls today, with water running through the moss before escaping into freefall for a few feet.
