April 15, 2026 – This is one of two locations we revisited this year that we also visited on our 2019 trip to New Zealand. The shot I took in 2019 lacked the weather conditions needed to qualify as the dramatic image I had dreamed of capturing. For this trip, we stayed in Wanaka for four nights, hoping that one of the mornings during our stay would yield a dramatic sunrise. On the first morning, we made it a point to get up early and be at That Wanaka Tree for sunrise, and that morning proved to be the best of our stay. I would have liked to include more of the beach on the left side, but it was occupied by about 200 of my “new best friends.”
A fresh blanket of snow covers Mount Aspiring / Tititea, New Zealand’s 23rd-highest mountain. The peak’s altitude of 9,951 ft. (3,033 meters) makes it the country’s highest outside the Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park region.
This image is derived from 450 focus-bracketed images, yielding 30 focus-stacked images in a 3-row by 10-column array. Shot using a Canon R5 Mk II with a Canon RF 100-400mm zoom lens at 300mm, f/11, 1/20 sec. exposure time, and ISO 100. I used Adobe Camera Raw for preprocessing. Focus stacking was done with Helicon Focus Pro, and stitching was done using PTGui. Post-processing was completed in Photoshop.
The original full sized image is:
665 Megapixels
18,127 x 36,730 pixels
60″ x 122″ (5 ft. x 10 ft. 2 in. ) 152 cm x 309 cm. 300 PPI (118 ppcm) original image size
