Timberline Lodge on the south slope of Mt. Hood in Oregon is one of the classic historical lodges of North America.  Built by skilled craftsmen during the 1930’s, the lodge survives today as a living museum.  It’s an excellent hotel, with nicely appointed rooms, and an excellent bar and restaurant.  The entire business is laid out in grand scale – like the stuff was built to last…well, forever.  After 80+ years, it all looks like it just might have a chance.  The attention to detail is persistent  throughout the structure, yet the light fixture shown above, got my eye.  You just gotta ask…Why?  Massive, over-designed, and completely impractical, yet startling beautiful – or at least I think so – and so, I must guess, did the men who crafted the stuff.

I’m still experimenting with the Detail Enhancer mode of the HDR software package Photomatix.  As I’ve mentioned before, this adds a sort of magical quality to images of interiors that I find quite compelling.  The image above was generated using the Nikon D700 and the AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED at 24mm.  Exposures were f/16 and 1/4s, 1/2s, 1s, 2s, and 4s, all at an ISO of 800.  The following mapping parameters were used:

Luminosity:  0

Strength:  90

ColorSaturation:  46

WhiteClip:  0.249450

BlackClip:  0.000000

Smoothing:  Medium

Microcontrast:  10

Microsmoothing:  9

Gamma:  1.000000

HighlightsSmoothing:  21

ShadowsSmoothing:  12

ShadowsClipping:  0

ColorTemperature:  0

SaturationHighlights:  0

SaturationShadows:  0