All images and material © 2016 by Mike Clasen Photography • All Rights Reserved • Use By Permission Only
So the name for this image was not totally taken from anything I saw in this scene, except for the sunset explosion over the Sierra Nevada, and the dream like tufa spires in the foreground. The name ‘Exploder’ is a heavy metal guitar solo by Akira Takasaki from the Japanese heavy metal band “Loudness” back in 1984-ish. Dream Fantasy is a song from the band Loudness which includes a drum solo, also from around 1984-ish (been a long time). Combine both names, and there you have it. This was captured at Mono back in October of 2012. This was the type of afternoon, where you can only hope for the weather conditions that were at Mono Lake on this day. I was shooting to the east where dark gray/blue luminous storm clouds were swallowing up the horizon, and light was dancing off the landscape and clouds. Calm reflections of the storm spanned across Mono Lake, it was a show to say the least, and I was unaware of what was starting to happen behind me. I was moving rather fast, tripod and camera attached, capturing the storm and sunset colors that were starting to unfold on the east side. I started to head for another spot and turned around to walk around some tufa spires, when BAM, there it was… I was like, holy shit! Nobody else was in the area I was at, so there were no photo bombs. At the time, I could not recall a sunset more glorious than this, and still, I am sure I have seen one, but this one blew me away. It had been so long, that I almost forgot about this trip, and I only processed a few pics initially after it, and it was pretty crappy processing for what I knew back then. So I went to revisit the images over the weekend, and I found this capture that I had bracketed during the shoot, and merged to HDR using Photomatix Pro back in 2012 So, I opened up the merged HDR image in PS and started working on it, and this is what I came up with. © MIKE CLASEN PHOTOGRAPHY www.mikeclasenphotography.com
This was not a capture I planned on working out. I only took three bracketed sequences of this shot (literally setup and captured them in a couple minutes), as I figured it would be a wash due to shooting directly into the sun. For one bracketed sequence; I blocked the sun with my fingers to get rid of the sun flares in foreground. Blending the exposures worked out ok.. If the little cloud would not have been there to diffuse the sun somewhat as it was rising, this would not have worked out with the sun star, as it would have been too bright and overpowering. Captured April 2015... © MIKE CLASEN PHOTOGRAPHY www.mikeclasenphotography.com
The weather in the Reno/Tahoe area and in the Sierra Nevada has been out of the ordinary during the summer of 2015. We have had a LOT of storms roll through and a LOT of rainfall. A great time to go get some of those photo-ops waiting up in the Sierra’s and surrounding areas. The reflections on this hidden Sierra gem, are a site to behold. This is one of the prettiest alpine lakes in the Sierra Nevada I have had the privilege of visiting. It takes little work to frame a shot and alleviate any signs of human involvement. So, I hit pixel burnout on this image. There is a lot of shade, if not total shade in this image, it took a lot tweaking to get this image as close to how it looked when I was there. It was dark when I captured this image (total shade), so when I was adjusting levels selectively and globally while viewing the histogram, it became very monotonous, a lot of dodging and burning. This is an exposure blend of two images (for the sky), from a stand and shoot capture in July 2015. © MIKE CLASEN PHOTOGRAPHY www.mikeclasenphotography.com
