Norway just is beautiful, both in the summer time and in the winter time. I caught this one last week next to the ski-resort in Trysil. It’s a 7 shot HDR and tone mapped in Photomatix and later post-processed in Photoshop.

I found this peaceful area just behind the Trysil Mountain Resort Park Inn hotel. I could walk on a path made by skis. If I went of the path, I sank to the knee.

About the composition

Finally after 4 days the clouds  cleared from the Sun and I got out take some photographs. In this one, I have got two major point of interest, one is the stone covered in snow and the other is the Sun. I have placed them approximately on one of the lines of the golden ration. Then I have used the shadows from the trees to create lead in lines. This is a neat trick that works well. And at last, I made sure that the left hand side of the snow takes up the same amount of space as the ski. That works well too.

Post-processing

The post processing is done as a tone mapped image in Photomatix, which I then took into Photoshop. I blended the layers, as I explain how to do in my HDR tutorial, and then I used a golden filter from Topaz Adjust. I had lost some of the golden light in the processing and reintroduced it. And the last things I did in Photoshop was to remove flares and a small rainbow looked too much like a flare. In Lightroom I increased the contrast a bit and the clarity to get more dynamic image.