This is another one of those images that I took relatively recently, but have edited on several different occasions, working it till I finally got it to where I had imagined it in my mind.

To me, one of my favorite things about this shot is that I can honestly say, it is extremely close to how I pictured the final product looking while I was photographing it. Recently, much of my long exposure landscape photography has been inspired by the work of Michael Levin and this image is no exception. What strikes me about his work is that it usually feels like it's working on only 4 of the zone - referencing the zone-system - as opposed to using all ten. I'd imagine that this isn't technically the case, but he produces his images in such a way that they appear in that manner. They seem to have a bright highlight, mid-tone highlight, mid-tone shadow and then strong shadow with seemingly not much else in between.

Another thing about this image is that it pushed me. I knew the result that I wanted and knew - generally - what needed to be done to get there. But, I had to try to learn a few new techniques to accomplish what I wanted. It feels good to push like that. There will most likely be a few of you who will disagree with this thought, but I enjoy when I am having to work equally as hard to pre-visualize the shot, capture the shot and then post-produce it. In fact, with some of my recent photography, some of the more difficult work has been done in post-processing as opposed to in camera.

This brings up the whole arguement of where the line is between producing natural images working mainly in camera, and producing images that rely almost entirely on post-processing to come alive. While this is a long enough topic to warrant a blog post all of it's own, I'll weigh in with a few of my thoughts. 1. Didn't the photography of Ansel Adams rely heavily on work done much after the actual photo was taken? 2. If you are pre-visualizing a shot in a way that a camera maybe canno