August 12, 2011
Sunrise Clouds Over Lake in Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming

We had a fantastic time yesterday morning photographing sunrise at two unnamed lakes near the Beartooth Highway. My favorite image is from the first lake when the low clouds developed some orange color and the higher clouds filled in the gap in the upper right. I used the shift motion of my 24 tilt/shift lens to look down while keeping the camera body vertical to avoid keystoning, the tilt motion to place the plane of focus from the foreground rock to the trees on the horizon, a polarizer to maximize the reflection on the lake, a 2-stop hard graduated neutral density filter to balance the exposure between the bright sky and the darker lake, and a 3-stop solid neutral density filter to lengthen the exposure to smooth out the small ripples on the lake. Then I processed the RAW file three times to further even out the exposure and combined them by hand in Photoshop.

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