Aug. 9, 2017, 05:36. My friend Bill and I woke up at 02:30 to drive the 30 miles from Teklanika River Campground to Stony Pass Overlook. I had a Professional Photographers Pass that year, which allowed me to take my vehicle into the park. That is one of the few ways one can be in this park location at sunrise unless you are willing to sleep overnight in a tent with Denali Brown Bears roaming the area.
The evening before, we had consulted Photopills and GPS data and determined the full moon would be nearly over the top of Mt. Denali at sunrise. At the campground, we had overcast skies, but we decided to go anyway, trusting the Lord would give us clear skies at Stony Pass.
While the scene when we arrived at Stony Pass wasn't the clear skies with the nearly full moon over the peak I had envisioned, it was beyond anything I could have imagined. As the sun neared the horizon, the Alpenglow painted the clouds and mountains with hues of pink to orange while the nearly full moon hung suspended above the peaks. In addition, the light of the Alpenglow on the clouds reflected into the valley below Stony Pass, illuminating the tundra, which was starting to show signs of fall colors, intensifying the colors of the tundra foliage. That year, smoke from wildfires in British Columbia, Canada, had also drifted towards Alaska, resulting in some magnificent sunrises.
The original un-cropped version of this panorama consists of 12 individual HDR 42 mega-pixel images shot with a Sony a7R II at f/11, bracketed .5, 1/8sec and 2 seconds and ISO 100 using a 100mm lens yielding an image 39" x 70". The cropped image as shown is 7670 x 11504 pixels, measuring 25.5 in. x 38.4 in.
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