Image(s)
Image Description
I had heard of the frozen waves that occur in winter on Dream Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park for years and had wanted to hike up there to see and photograph them. The frozen ice waves are an unbelievable wintertime phenomenon that can be caused by freezing temperatures and strong dry winds. It is called sublimation, which is the process where a solid (ice) changes directly into a gas without becoming a liquid first. Dream Lake experiences incredibly strong dry winds during the winter months. Eddy currents of the dry air blowing across the ice surfaces slowly but surely wears patterns in ice’s surface. In locations near logs or rocks this is exacerbated even more.
However the thought of hiking to Dream Lake in the dead of winter wasn’t my idea of a “good time”. Last week a fellow photographer asked me to go with him so finally just 6 days shy of my 75th birthday I finally did it. Being a consummate gigapixel wall mural photographer of course I was determine to shoot one of my trademark gigapixel photos of the scene. Over the past couple weeks folks had been posting photos of the ice waves. I wanted to capture something that went beyond just another “me-too” shot.
Our goal was to capture a shot at or near sunrise to catch the sunrise light on Hallett Peak, the flat topped mountain on the left. When we arrived we noticed the Half-Moon hovering in the sky just to the left of Hallett so it was a mad rush to get the gear setup to be able to include the Moon in the shot.
Feedback Requests
Always interested in feedback on composition, emotional and technical aspects of my images
Pertinent Technical Details
This is a focus stacked, stitched image made up of 7090 individual focus bracketed images. This yielded 225 focus stacked sets in a 9 row by 25 column array. I was using a Canon R5 with a 100-400mm f/4.0-5.6 lens with a Nodal Ninja M2 head on my carbon fiber tripod. Settings were 300mm, f/11, 1/100th sec., ISO 400. My nearest focal point was about 8 ft. from the camera that was mounted about 2-1/2 ft. above the frozen surface of the lake. Processing was done initially in Camera RAW to convert to TIFF format. The photos were then ran through Helicon Focus Pro to focus stack them. I used PTGui to do the stitching and then post processing was done with Photoshop.
The finished image is 4.63 Gigapixels, 49,696 x 93,276 pixels (165" x 310").
A full screen virtual tour of the photo can be viewed at this link. (Use your left mouse button to pan & tilt. Roller to zoom.) https://abbascreationsphotography.com/Frozen_in_time/index.html