Sunrise a Mt. Hood's perfect viewing location Trillium Lake is really good enough for most people. I was very close to just capturing this morning with a single image, but when I realized that I wanted my photo to stand out among the thousands of others that have shot this location with similarly beautiful skies I decided to make it a bigger process.
I have done similar shots with places like the Tunnel View in Yosemite, but I have never done it in a 3x6 format with this level of success. The resulting file is a 200 megapixel crop of what I actually shot, and the details at 1-to-1 will blow your mind!
An example of a crop from the larger 200 megapixel image!
I shot these all from a tripod at an exposure time of 1/15th of a second to properly expose everything in the image. After import to Lightroom they were merged in Photoshop to complete the panorama that is 3 images tall by 6 wide. Each shot had about a third overlap to help with the processing time and accuracy. My computer still took about 15 minutes to complete the panorama with still several errors I had to go in and manually fix.
A crop of the opposite shore-line where you can see incredible detail in the trees.
All of my post-processing time, shooting, and driving combined took 9 hours to complete, but that was all worth it given the massive amounts of detail in the image that is almost better than standing on location! You can actually look in and see individual branches on trees across the lake in a tiny crop of the photo. The detail in this image actually beats that of $60,000 Medium Format camera setups, and I plan to make a gorgeous print of this image to put up in my gallery soon. It will be a limited run of 42 ever produced as well for sale.
The final 200 megapixel image downsized to 8 megapixels for the web.