Picture Story

As a wall mural photographer, I am always on the lookout for scenes that I think would make suitable wall murals. Therefore, I had scouted this location the day before. Based on PhotoPills, it appeared that the sunrise would light up the Northeast face of the tower nicely from this location, about a mile east-south-east of the tower.

I was up early at around 04:00, to allow me time to drive to the location. I arrived at about 04:45, just as the first light showed on the horizon, so I quickly hiked to this location and set up my panoramic nodal head. As the first light illuminated the wispy clouds, I could see that it would be a glorious sunrise.

With all the trees in the foreground, during my scouting trip, I had planned the day before to do a focused stacked panorama, so I set up my R5 camera to do focus bracketing. I waited until the Alpenglow was just starting to illuminate the tower and started shooting at the top left corner of the 66 positions that make up the stitched set.

Just as I started shooting, the pinks and reds of the early light exploded. The smoother areas of the tower reflected the light. The grass in the lower right has begun to ripen, providing some golden tones, while the red earth compliments the green of the pine trees.

This is a focus-bracketed set of images comprising 260 individual focus-bracketed frames, yielding 66 individual focus-stacked images, 3 rows x 22 columns.

Processing consisted of RAW conversion to tiff format with adjustments to highlights and shadows. I then imported the focus bracketed images into Helicon Focus and did the focus stacking. Next, I used PTGui to stitch the images into the stitched image. I then did the final processing in Photoshop.

The original un-cropped image is 1.04 Gigapixels, 25,089 x 42,599 pixels, 83" x 142" 300 PPI (6 ft. 11in. x 11 ft. 10in.)