Picture of the Day - 10/24/2010

Sunrise at Garden of the Gods - This morning, I left early to try photographing the full moon setting during sunrise. Since there was cloud cover, there was  no moon to be seen, however, I hoped for a decent sunrise and was rewarded beyond my imagination! I walked uphill from the visitor center and concentrated on taking panoramics of the scene as events unfolded. I knew the cloud cover to the west would provide some dramatic color, so I maximized it in the composition. Notice, also, that when composing panoramics, it's a good idea to find an obvious starting and ending point - in this case, the rock formations. This will give the viewer a more pleasing experience. For this image, I used eight overlapping vertical shots and imported them into Panorama Maker 5 Pro, which I use to build most of my panoramics. Although advertised to, Panorama maker doesn't seem to play well with raw-format images, so I exported the unaltered raw images to JPEGs using Lightroom prior to building the panorama. Once I had the JPEG panorama, I made slight adjustments in Lightroom. In the past, I've noticed that while photographing the formations during sunrise, the red channel of the imager tends to oversaturate more quickly than the blue and green channels, so I actually had to unsaturate the red channel a bit in Lightroom to make the colors more realistic. What you see here is very close to what I saw - pretty amazing! It does pay to get up early!