Sept. 22, 2023. 9:30am. Hanging Lake had long been on my list of “must photograph” locations. I had tried several times to schedule a trip to this location near Glenwood Springs, CO. This year, we intentionally booked a campground nearby so that I could add this location to my portfolio.
As a wall mural photographer, my goal was to create a finished image of at least 1 Gigapixel in size. This meant that I had to shoot with a focal length of at least 200mm- 300mm. Because the distance between the viewing platform on the south side of the lake and the water fall is only about 40 yards (36 meters), focus stacking was a given. To keep my backpack weight down as much as possible, I choose to take only my 300mm prime lens. I loaded up the pack with camera, lens, spare batteries, Nodal Ninja M2 Giga nodal head, and my SLIK carbon fiber tripod.
Hanging Lake has a Timed-Entry Pass that must be purchased in advance. I knew that because the lake sits in a deep canyon, the early morning Golden Hour would not be the optimum time to shoot the location. I picked an 8am slot, figuring that the hike would take about an hour. Photo Pills showed that the light would be fully in the canyon by around 9am. The 1.25-mile (2km) and 1000 ft (304m) elevation gain hike with my 35lb (13kg) camera bag on my back was about all my 72-year-old legs could handle. But I did make it, and boy was the effort ever worth it.
Hanging Lake is an incredibly popular destination, so there were dozens of people walking around the area. I set up my gear, adjusted the camera’s exposure, and enabled the focus bracketing mode. Knowing I would be shooting at 300mm, I had set up the Nodal Ninja M2 the night before for that focal length. I started shooting, often having to wait for people to move out of my shot. The R5 is a joy to use for this kind of shooting. The focus bracketing is easy to use and extremely fast.
This is a focus-stacked image shot with my Canon R5 and Canon 300mm lens. It is composed of 2,928 focus-bracketed images, focus-stacked using Helicon Focus Pro to yield 308 individual focus-stacked images, arranged in 11 rows and 27 columns with a 30% overlap in portrait orientation. The focus-stacked images were then stitched using PTGui Pro. Final processing was done in Photoshop.
This original finished image is 5.9 Gigapixels, 58,409 x 101,066 pixels, 194″ x 336″, 300 PPI (4.92m x 8.53m), un-cropped image size.
