With Fall rapidly approaching, I felt that 14er season, especially for novices like me, would be quickly coming to a close. Emboldened by my recent success on Capital Peak, I decided to go after Long’s Peak. When the leaves are down, I can just about see it out my office window. A quick drive around the block reveals the towering peak, in all of it’s glory. It’s been taunting me since we moved into the house last November. I could no longer just ignore it. So, I checked the weather about a thousand times, squared away my affairs with work for the week, packed a huge heap of clothing, food, and water, and set my alarm for 2:45 AM. Two hours and 15 minutes later (I really need to work on my alpine starts) I was on the trail and ready to rock.
I’ve really been in the mood for experimentation lately, so I started by running my GoPro for a short section of the pre-dawn approach (seen above). I used my Hero 3 Black with ProTune turned on, and attempted to brighten things up using Premier Pro. It didn’t come out the best, but it’s a starting point. I’ll have to read up, or try again.
At the suggestion of my comrade Andrew, I started shooting stills using the raw format rather than jpeg. From what I gather, the image quality is higher, there is no compression and no color manipulation. The same is more or less true when using ProTune on the GoPro. All of this lends to a better quality original stock, and confers advantages in post-processing. With all of this in mind, I quickly obtained a trial license of Lightroom and commenced fiddling. Results are seen below. Hopefully this doesn’t make me too big of a cheater: I tried to keep my manipulations on the tasteful side, though there is some decided experimentation going on here. What can I say? I enjoy fiddling with computers…
Stay tuned for a follow up post with more detail on the hike itself and possibly some sort of GoPro edit featuring the harrowing final approach to the summit!
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