This morning I’m in my home-office, in the middle of sending an e-mail and look out to the south. I could see one small band of pink clouds on the horizon and a band of clear blue sky behind it. Without even thinking I told my assistant “I’ll be back”. Still in my lightweight house shoes, I grabbed a heavyweight jacket and jumped in my truck. I drove a block away to where I could get a better view of the mountains and parked along a residential street. I thought it was GREAT when I got there so I quickly set up my Canon 5D Mark III with a 24-105 f4 lens on a tripod. I did not take the time to put on a split ND filter at first and I composed several images. Even shot a set of images as a panoramic to stitch together later, as the sunrise stretched a LONG way across the horizon. It just kept getting better and better. I took the time to put on a 2-stop Singh-Ray split ND filter, so that I could get more detail in the foreground homes and mountains. I could tell by the histogram that the exposure liked that idea. I was mostly shooting horizontal images, but as the clouds got more and more color higher up, I switched to vertical to keep it all in perspective. Most of the exposures here are at 1/10 ish, F8 at ISO 200.
