I photographed this unique landscape on the outskirts of La Paz, Bolivia. The altitude was 13,000 feet. My heavy camera backpack and the elevation meant I had to move in slow motion to conserve oxygen consumption. The sky was mostly cloudy, but for a moment a window opened up and sunlight hit the mountain. That really made the shot. Light in nature often doesn't cooperate with photographers, but when it does, the results are beautiful and dramatic. I shot this image with film, in the days before HDR, and the rule with transparency film was always 'expose correctly for the highlights.' Dark shadows were (and are) acceptable, but overexposed highlights rarely work. Had I taken this today, I would have taken a 5-frame HDR sequence of exposures. In the Mamiya RZ 67 system, I used a 110mm lens which is equivalent to a 50mm normal lens in the full frame digital format. My settings would have been 1/4, f/32, and 50 ISO.
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