Mount Assiniboine And Sunburst Peak

This is an image of Mount Assiniboine and its surrounding peaks in Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park, in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, Canada. The park is very remote and access is only by a multiday backpacking trip or by helicopter. This image was taken in September of 2016 on the seventh and last day of my visit to this amazing area. I chose this time of year in the hope of getting some fresh snow on the mountains, crisp clear air and autumn colors. For six days the weather had been quite disappointing—mostly cloudy. However, on my last afternoon in the park, conditions were looking good in the late afternoon, so I headed up the trail to the vantage point on a ridge overlooking this scene. I’ve been to this location many times over previous years, so I knew exactly what I was after. Normally, I’d venture to this overlook for sunrise, but fortunately, this particular view is to the southwest so the mountains can get great light at both sunrise and sunset at this time of year. After reaching the ridge, conditions continued to come together nicely and my main concern was to try to avoid including a number of other photographers who were madly dashing around, looking to capture that perfect shot. As the sun was setting, the clouds overhead started to take on a lovely warm yellow tone and the sunlight kissed the north faces of the peaks. The snow and ice-capped top of Mount Assiniboine (the pointy pyramid-shaped peak just left of center) was hit by the sunlight nicely and the golden-yellow larch trees in the valley bottom were illuminated as well. I continued to take photos varying my compositions over about an hour as the lighting and clouds continually changed. I selected one of the better five-shot bracketed groups of images that best captured the various elements of the scene. Overall, I was quite pleased with how everything came together so nicely and this image is one of my favorites from that trip to this spectacular area.

This image started as five separate exposures, taken in quick succession, in order to capture the details in both the shadows and the highlights. I first merged the images in Photomatix Pro. I then did some fine-tuning in Photoshop and finished by saving the image as a reasonably sized jpeg for the web. The high megapixel Canon full-frame SLR was able to capture amazing details in the scene, and this small jpeg doesn’t really do it justice.

Canon EOS 5DS R, Canon EF 16-35mm f/4L IS USM lens at 20mm, ISO 100. Exposure: HDR composite of five separate images (1/40, 1/250, 1/100, 1/15, 1/6) at f/10.

See more of Roger Hostin’s photography at rogerhostin.com and follow him on Facebook.