I had reconned this location the night before. It was my planned milky way photo to capture that mound at night, which an overcast sky denied. See my White Pocket Sunset page, which shows the cloud cover. However, that concept would have been cool, if I could have also capture the milky way reflecting in the water pool. When I found that the Eastern bluff was hindering golden hour shots, I returned to the shadow side to capture the last fleeting moments of the blue hour sky. Efforts before this photo to capture another location delayed this composition and found me rushing to put it together before morning golden light dominated the scene. The other item that bothered me was that the light on that butte would draw the first attention to viewer, but I’ll leave that determination to them. The aim of this image is to capture the mound and cloud tones as I portrayed a story of the sunrise from behind the mound. This image is a composite of six photos. Three bracketed photos of the sky at 2 stops intervals were merged together to expand the dynamic range that would retain the salmon refracted light on the clouds. Three other photos were taken of the landscape with 2 stop intervals to ensure that cloud tone was rendered in the water. Then the two composite images were blended. Post processing shows that this composite image resulted into brightness value of 5.93 and exposure bias of a -7/10 indicating that post processing editing almost returned the image to it’s true shadow light. Since this was blue hour, I expected tints of blue would be part of the dominate color theme, as revealed below in the extract color theme. As expected the majority of the extracted theme colors were blue tones, but with golden hour occurring on opposite side the peak of the mound picked up brown tones. The tonal ranges also were very low in saturation, but that is to be expected for a blue hour image. This image showed a more complementary color theme. PhotoPills was used to frame this composition. The clouds normalized shortly after taking this image as sunlight filled the high mesa landscape.
