Dream Lake in Golden Early Morning Light -- Dream Lake, Rocky Mtn. National Park, Colorado
Hallett Peak at 12,720 ft, towers above Dream Lake as a fisherman tries his luck in this high mountain lake. Every other time I had hiked to Dream Lake there was always high winds. I had been watching the weather forecast for wind for the previous few days and the wind was predicted to be calm on this day. Hoping for a rare mirror surface on the lake, I got up at 3am and drove to Bear Lake and made the 1.1 mile hike to Dream Lake arriving about 5:30am. Sunrise was at 6:27am so I had plenty of time to locate where I wanted to shoot from. I waited about 15 minutes after the sunrise to allow the light to reach into the valley.
This is an focus stacked image shot with Canon R5, Canon 300mm f/4.0 lens mounted on a Nodal Ninja M2 head. Settings were f/11, 1/125th sec. exposure, ISO 400. It is made up of 4566 images with the majority of the the images being Focus Bracketed images processed to yield 372 individual Focus Stacked images, 12 rows x 31 columns 30% overlap in portrait orientation. Focus stacking was done using Helicon Focus Pro and stitching was done with PTGui. Post processing was done in Photoshop.
The original image is:
6.26 Giga-pixels
59,349 x 105,509 pixels
197" x 351" 300 PPI (16 ft. 5 in. X 29 ft. 4 in.) un- cropped image size