Mount Bonnell Sunset – Austin, Texas

I’m wrapping up coverage from Mount Bonnell with this photograph. My favorite landscape that I made with the Fujifilm GFX 50R. I mentioned previously that to create a worthwhile landscape, I took multiple trips to this overlook in April. Finally, towards the end of that month, after a rainstorm, I struck gold. I captured this dreamy scene at sunset.

You can have the fanciest camera, but you can’t trick the light. The mix of clouds, the low-level fog, and the colors at sunset combined together to make something special. Of course, a superior camera helped. I was able to push the post-processing more aggressively to bring out the fog covered details and the smattering of man-made lights that were starting to turn on.

Previous to this, my favorite from Mount Bonnell was this one, which I featured for my first post on this blog, over 10 years ago. As you can tell, that was a very different kind of photo, with its super-processed HDR look in super-wide-angle. I rarely shoot that wide anymore — the 16mm equivalent seems too extreme. Today’s Fuji has a 40mm equivalent view, which is closer to what the human eye sees.

Another big difference is that picture from over a decade ago was only 8MP, made with a Canon 20D DSLR. Now, I get to play with 51MP. I like today’s photo so much that I got it printed really big, and I hung it in the guest room. I used a new kind of printing technology, but that is a discussion for a future post.

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