Last week I had work up in the Bishop, CA area, a place I’m ashamed to say, I’ve never visited before. After an early morning survey flight of a nearby fire, I had a four and a half hour drive back to LA with the Eastern Sierras taunting me. Since I grew up in Colorado, mountains have always been special for me.  As I always look forward to spending time amongst them, it was disappointing that my drive back started around 11:30AM.  Unfortunately, my schedule didn’t allow  a six hour wait for better light. On top of that, the whole valley was very hazy.  Hazy mid-day light is not an inspiring situation for a photographer.  Well, I couldn’t resist at least trying.  Despite the dismal light, the mountains were still majestic, and deserved an effort.  The resulting photo would never hold up to critical scrutiny or get a spot on a wall, but it does show that you can still get acceptable results with just a little forethought, and a little computer time.  I knew the raw photos would look awful, but with the sun overhead, the polarized portion of the sky was right over the mountains, so I could at least get a nice blue sky with contrasty clouds.  I took a series of five bracketed photos +2+1 0 -1-2 (with tripod of course) and hoped for the best.  When I got back, I combined the images in some new software I’ve been testing (HDR Effects PRO) and got a pretty flat looking result, but the full dynamic range was present, which gave me something to work with in Photoshop CS5.  I applied my curve cocktails that I’ve been refining for years, and boosted the saturation a slight amount. Again, the resulting image is nothing terribly special, but it does come closer to what I had in my mind’s eye on that frustrating drive home.