In wet years such as 2010 miraculous things happen in Death Valley.  Water accumulates in what was once the lake bottom of glacial Lake Manley.  And if you're lucky enough to be in the Valley before it evaporates you have some extraordinary photographic opportunities.

In February Jack Graham and I conducted a photography workshop here. I drove in by way of Shoshone and Salisbury Pass the day before it started.  This is the southern end of the valley and a part that is rarely visited.  I drove by one pond after another.  This one near Mormon Pint was especially interesting with muddy shallows with interesting patterns.  So after checking in and meeting up with some early-arriving workshop attendees we returned for sunset.

We all shot a number of things but toward the end I found myself shooting this wide angle scene.  My 24mm lens wasn't wide enough to get everything I wanted so I put the camera into vertical mode and shot a three-wide panorama.  To complicate matters a little more the dynamic range was great enough that I needed to shoot each of the panorama shots in three-exposure HDR.  I shot several series of panoramas and the one selected for the print of the month was the very last one.

I couldn't wait to start processing this image so when I got back to my room in Stovepipe Wells I uploaded them into Lightroom and went through the preliminary steps of preparing TIFF files for PhotoMatix.  There were nine TIFF files in all.

In PhotoMatix I created the three HDR images that would eventually be stitched together to form the panorama.  They were all processed identically with the aim of avoiding any shadow or highlight clipping.  I added a little contrast and a small amount of saturation but not much.

Back in Photoshop I began the long process of stitching the three images together.  Mind you, my camera has a 21 M pixel full frame sensor so each TIFF file with no layers is about 60-70 MB.  Needless to say, with source files that size the stitching process took quite a while.  But finally it completed.  the next step was to crop the image into a rectangle and save it.  This also took quite a while and I want to sleep at midnight with the computer still writing the file to the hard disk.

Because the file was so large I applied a few more adjustments to the cropped image in Lightroom before completing it in Photoshop.  The final image is 1.8 GB and has a resolution of 55 M pixels.  It's too bad you can't see it blown up.  It's absolutely mind blowing.