Torres del Paine, Patagonia, Chile

Even on a day with an overcast sky, the spectacular mountains of Torres del Paine in the Patagonia region of Chile are amazing. They are so dynamic and beautiful that it's hard to stop staring at them. For this picture, I used what I call the Classic Landscape Technique where I find a striking subject for the foreground and place it very close to the camera position. I then used a wide angle lens -- in this case a 24mm lens -- to exaggerate perspective and provide a strong sense of depth. I used f/16, a small aperture that creates complete depth of field because landscape photos should virtually always be sharp from front to back. I focused to about eight feet into the picture, and this gave me the most DOF I could get given the focal length, the subject-camera distance, and the lens aperture. I used a tripod, of course, and daylight white balance. This is a 5-frame HDR composite with one f/stop increments between exposures, and I set the ISO to 500.