Photos

So... i thought long and hard about uploading one of my other sunrise-ish pictures from the summit of a small mountain/hill near Mariato, Panama, but decided it just didn't quite grab me enough.

i will, however, post it as a workshop, as well as a picture taken during the descent that gives a little feel for conditions on the hill.

This was taken shortly after starting to descend. i wanted to meet somebody at 7:45 on the coast and this picture was taken at about 6:45, so i didn't have a real long time to burn, but i liked the way that the foreground tree coincided with the clouds to the west.

The water in the foreground is the outer reaches of the Gulf of Montijo, and the islands in the background are part of the chain that form the barrier between the Gulf of Montijo and the Pacific Ocean proper.

The first workshop is an attempt at a sunrise picture on a morning when clouds hid the real sunrise. i had no Grad ND filter, so this was taken through the glass on my camera with no help to balance the exposure, which left the sky a bit lighter than i would have liked. Postprocessing consisted of some curves and levels, but i didn't HDR it, although it probably needs HDR-ing.

The second workshop is my friend descending one of the many runoff ditches that we used as a clean-ish route to the summit. The ridge that we decided to use was, as with everything else in the area, thoroughly overgrown, so by staying in the runoff ditches (and praying that a sudden rainstorm didn't come up) we were able to avoid the dense vegetation a little bit. As you can see, however, it was still a little bit overgrown. At times the runoff ditches reached heights of up to 10 feet and widths of no more than two feet.