Hanging Lake near Glenwood, CO had long been on my list of "must photograph" locations. I had tried several times to schedule a trip to this location near Glenwood Springs, CO. This year we intentionally booked a campground nearby so that I could add this location to my portfolio. The 1.25 mile and 1000 ft elevation gain hike with my 35lb camera bag on my back was about all these 72 year old legs could handle. But I did make it and boy was the effort ever worth it. One of the most popular iconic hikes in Colorado, Hanging Lake narrowly escaped the Grizzly Creek wide fire in August of 2020.
This is an focus stacked image shot with Canon R5, Canon 300mm f/4.0 lens mounted on a Nodal Ninja M2 head. It was shot at f/13, 1/320th sec. exposure, ISO 400. It is made up of 2928 images with the majority of the the images being Focus Bracketed images processed to yield 308 individual Focus Stacked images, 11 rows x 27 columns 30% overlap in portrait orientation. Preprocessing was done using ACR. Focus stacking was done with Helicon Focus Pro and stitching with PTGui Pro. Final post processing was done in Photoshop.
The original image is:
5.9 Giga-pixels
58,409 x 101,066 pixels
194" x 336" 300 PPI (16 ft. X 28 ft.) un- cropped image size