Hallett Peak at 12,720 ft, towers above Dream Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park 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 shot this on Aug. 29, 2023. at 6:45am. August is the month here in Colorado when there is the least wind. I had been watching the weather forecast for wind for the previous several 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. I was blessed in the fact that that morning there wasn't a breath of wind so the lake remained a mirror surface for the entire 20 minutes it took to shoot the set of photos
This is a focus stacked image shot with Canon R5, Canon 300mm f/4 lens at f/11, 1/125th sec. exposure, ISO 400 using the R5's focus bracketing mode. 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 33% overlap in portrait orientation. I used Helicon Focus Pro to do the focus stacking. I then stitch the focus stacked set using PTGui. I then imported the stitched image into Photoshop for final processing
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