This morning, my photo tour group left our hotel at 3am to hike to a waterfall at the base of Mt. Fitzroy. We used flashlights and headlamps to negotiated the well-worn trail in the dark, and arrived at the blue hour. It was about 3 1/2 miles one way with a 1200 foot elevation gain. A few people decided not to do it, but most of the group took the challenge and were rewarded with another spectacular sunrise. This time, the peak was somewhat obscured in clouds, but the orange/pink light made the giant monolith glow with intense color and the clouds added a wonderful mystique to the scene. You might think I've added a lot of saturation in post-processing, but I didn't. This is the actual color. It was stunning. The photographic challenge I had to deal with was that the waterfall was nestled between walls of a canyon and, therefore, was several f/stops darker than the mountain. To create the effect of blurred water, a long shutter speed was necessary, but that blew out the sunrise lighting on the peaks. The only thing I could do was to take two shots -- one of the mountain and another, with different exposure settings, of the falling water. My shutter for the latter was 1.6 seconds. Then, in Photoshop, I pasted the two parts of the image together to give me a perfect exposure throughout of what I saw with my eyes.
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