Landcapes along I-77 in W.Va. and Va.

Yesterday's post was dedicated to a little bit of the iPhone camera's portraiture functionality (by no means, did I intend for that post to be an exhaustive analysis; it was simply an FYI ... or, to put a more casual spin on it, "Oh, by the way ... there's this" about the iPhone. Some of you may be way ahead of me in knowing all about that).

I have another iPhone "shoot" or two to address in blog posts, and this post is one of those.

When Lee Ann and I make our periodic commutes between Raleigh and Indianapolis (almost always for a family-related function), I am usually riding shotgun (not wanting to share driving chores is a Lee Ann thing, but I digress). My DSLR is always packed while traveling and nowhere close to where I can reach it in a hurry if we come upon something I'd love to photograph. So in those situations, I reach for the iPhone, which is always at the ready.

On the return portion of our recent commute to Indy for the holidays, we reached the mountains of West Virginia and Virginia between 4 and 5 p.m., a short while before sundown. I was struck by the dramatic lighting highlighting the setting sun was throwing on the rock formations along I-77, on the hills on both sides of us farther away and, eventually, on the sun as it reached its dropping point on the horizon.

I'll present the images in this post in chronological order in case you're one of those photographers who is astute about the characteristics of dramatic lighting. Maybe you can appreciate the progression characteristics, too.

The first in the series -- featuring rock formations along I-77, taken just after 4 p.m. -- leads off the post. The first two images below were taken at 4:33 p.m. I composed them to include a good chunk of the sky because of the sky's mix of tapestry.

The next image -- of the brightly lit hilly background -- and the two below it (featuring the large semitrailer-truck in front of us) were taken a minute apart. The hilly background at 4:43, the two of the truck at 4:44. I present two versions of the image, one a cropped version, the other to include the original featuring pattern cloud formations high in the sky.

All of the sundown pictures at the end were taken at 5:03 p.m.; they were very short bursts apart. As you can imagine, the scenery changed in each because of the car's movement at interstate speed. I include them all because of how something in each frame -- the sky, the sun or its flare, or the foreground -- changed dramatically enough to warrant some study, I felt. The latter two sundown images were cropped to eliminate undramatic sky.

Fog drifting through in the mountains ...

If you've ever driven in the Blue Ridge Mountains, just about anywhere near or along the Appalachian range, odds are that at some point you've come across the scene depicted above.

Patches of fog are not uncommon there, and I've seen them at least four times in the dozen or so trips I've made to the East Coast in the past three years. Not quite as rare as a solar eclipse, of course, but still unusual enough that you spend time appreciating it when you see it.

The most recent was June 13, in western Virginia and southern West Virginia, and I decided to see what I could record of it for as long as it hung around. The fact that I could use a dark, tree-laden background to bring out detail in the mist formations made it even more worth my while. That's what you see in these pictures; I used an iPhone 6s Plus and took these from the passenger seat of the car.

As I recall (it's been two months now), there was some rain at some point, though not a lot. Even though it was daylight, the skies were dark, so I tried to add some shadows detail in post-processing.