The sunset was just okay this Sunday evening, but the sunrise Monday morning was beautiful! Tired after getting only about 2 hours of sleep and spending the early morning shooting the Milky Way, I was treated to this scene below as a grand finale for my Lake Tahoe photo adventure. These incredible moments make me happy.
This is a stitched panoramic photo, meaning I shot 24 vertical images and then stitched them together using Photoshop's photomerge feature. Sometimes the photomerge doesn't work lining things up and I use PTGui to stitch the images, where you have more control of how the photos line up. Fortunately, I did a decent job shooting the photos and the horizon lined up nicely in Photoshop, which is a quicker way of proccesing these type of pano images. Explaining the whole editing process via text would be confusing and long. Maybe one day I'll record myself editing one of these and post it here, but it would be a looong video, these take a while to perfect.
Each of the 24 images were shot on the Canon 5Dsr with a 24-105mm lens set at 45mm. The ISO was 125, the aperture was f14, and each shot was 1.6 seconds long. A tripod and shutter release cable were used in order to keep the camera from shaking during the exposure. Two filters were used on the front of the lens - a polarizer in order to cut through the glare on the lake and bring out more of the aqua colors along the shoreline, and a graduated neutral density filter in order to darken the sky a bit and balance the foreground exposure with the sky's exposure.
The final pixel dimensions for this image are 19,083 x 6,848 - equivalent to about a 131 megapixel image. This one can be printed huge! (Hey, by the way, my prints can be ordered and shipped now in exchange for STEEM...)
The photo adventure where I shot this image can be seen in the 
Lake Tahoe Overnight Photo Adventure - Video
If you have any questions about this shot, please feel free to ask me in the comments below or you can ask in the 
Thank you for looking, reading, and watching!
Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography