February 16, 2014
Orange Sunset at White Pocket, Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, Arizona

Two days ago, we went to the White Pocket area of Vermilion Cliffs National Monument in the afternoon, and the clouds were mostly too thick to make interesting grand landscape images. Fortunately, there was a gap near the western horizon, and the setting sun really lit up the clouds. There was great color for more than 15 minutes! This image was created from five exposures to capture detail from the relatively dark foreground to the extremely bright sky at the horizon. The Lightroom HDR technique had trouble with parts of the sky and the foreground looked too grungy, so I manually blended the original exposures for those areas.