This image, "Moonrise, Glacier Point, Yosemite NP, CA," was made in September 1989. I had rented a house in Carmel for a month and took a side trip to Yosemite with my friend Alan Grossman. Neither of us had ever been there before, so we were both awestruck to say the least.
One day, we had heard there would be a good moonrise up at Glacier Point, elev. 7214 ft. We figured out what time we had to be there and were set up a little early. I made a few negatives, this one being the widest view. The negative looked nice, but the contrast range was so immense that I could never print it, and it went into a box for 20 years.
Fast forward to 2008. I had the 4x5" negative drum scanned at 4000 dpi. The file is 650MB. I did all my Photoshop work, cleaning up all the remnants of my less than pristine processing from my early days, and working to even out the huge contrast range. First I worked on the shadows in the gorge in the foreground. Then I worked on the area in the midground with the pine trees. Then the distant landscape, the clouds and the sky, in order. I think the image came out fairly well... much better than any version I had ever attempted (and discarded) in the darkroom.
My plans for this image are twofold. 1) Make a new silver 4x5" negative from my file that I can print in the darkroom, no larger than 11x14". Or maybe an 8x10" negative for contact printing only. Not sure yet. 2) Make a very large inkjet print, up to 40x50" and see what that looks like.
When I have attempted each, I will post my results.
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