Donner Summit Panoramic For #MountainMonday

Well, I considered going out for a sunrise shoot this morning but decided to workout instead. While I was working out, I saw a nice sunrise from my living room. Then, later this morning, I saw a local photographer post a photo of this morning's sunrise at Donner Lake. It was incredible!!! Doh!!! I really blew it by not going out this morning so I have no new photos to share and I'm feeling a bit frustrated about it.

But I did want to share this panoramic photo for @keithboone's #MountainMonday. It is shot from the Donner Summit area and you can see Donner Lake in the distance. This area of Donner Summit is one of my favorite places to go for a hike. The views are hard to beat.

This was actually one of the images that made it into my recent photo exhibit. I printed a 20"x60" canvas print for the show and I must say, it looked pretty sweet when printed that big. More about that exhibit can be seen in a dtube video HERE.

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"Donner Summit Sunrise 1"

Shot with a Canon 5DS R and a 24-105mm lens set at 24mm. Multiple photos were combined in Photoshop's Photomerge feature in order to create the long panoramic image (I don't remember how many photos were combined). The ISO for each of the images was 100, the aperture was f9, and the shutter speed was 1/5 second. A graduated neutral density filter was used on the lens in order to darken the sky and balance the sky's exposure with the foreground.

I remember that it was actually snowing a bit and it was very poor visibility with the low clouds when I was walking out to this spot in the dark before sunrise. I got "lost" when trying to find the vista point I was looking for. Fortunately, I was able to use Google Maps to determine where I was and I was able to find the vista point even in the difficult to see conditions.

Thank you for looking and reading!

Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography