Sunrise - Samsung NX10 - Samyang 8mm

Sunrise is delayed a bit by Miller's mountain when  looking east from our backyard. We don't see it in the valley until it crests the mountain, making our sunrise later than the technical one. There's a road that leads to the water tower close to the top if the mountain. Miller's mountain may look like a hill to you but when you try to ride a mountain bike up the road at what seems like a 45 degree angle, it becomes a mountain pretty quickly. The guy who owns the land (I met him one day riding up the side) keeps it open for hikers and bikers but no internal combustion vehicles. There is an unimproved mountain bike/ hiking trail that winds through the trees alongside the mountain, longitudinally. It is technical and I can't afford to break something up there so I walk it. There is evidence of homesteading here and there and there are various escarpments you have to navigate to continue to go up to the crest of the mountain. I've hiked the top but never from end to end. It's pretty extensive. I need to finish the tour. One day. Today's a beautiful day. I'll probably put it off though. I had the Samsung w/ fisheye out to take a shot of the camera for the blog, yesterday. It came in handy this morning to shoot the sky. I started out with a 50mm equivalent lens on another camera and quickly realized it wasn't going to cover the area I needed to cover. Here is the OOC jpg for comparison.

They say it's not the equipment you shoot with but the photographer that makes the shot. Maybe so but different equipment yields quite different results. You can take multiples and stich them together with the 50mm, which works fine but obviously it's easier to shoot wide to begin with and let's face it the final shot above would have required a lot of merging. So I went back inside and grabbed the Samsung, which was out and handy. I leave the Samsung in exposure bracket mode all the time. I shot three series of three HDR multiples (only used one of the three exposure series) and tried to combine them in Photoshop on my main computer, an old Macbook pro. It's an original intel pro, that's 32 bit. Photoshop has worked fine on it but today it couldn't combo the HDR shots from the 14mp Samsung originals. The combined shot was all black. I tried a few remedies but I think it lacks the necessary memory to do the job. So I had to revert to a Toshiba using Photomatrix. I cropped it because the top and bottom didn't add anything and converted to mono for my own esthetic. It also got some processing from an HDR filter I load into Irvanview. I took it because I like the large white cloud that arc's across the sky over the rays of the impending sun. I don't know if the arc started out as a contrail or not. It was pretty wide for that. Just another of those I'll never know. Let's hope I make good use of this beautiful winter day.