Mt Ngauruhoe at dawn. (day 2)

 

The classic Mt Ngauruhoe at dawn/dusk with a car light trail. This image has been done a million times by a million photographers, I’m sure, but it’s popular for a reason so I might as well get my own take on it, right?

I’d actually come out here the night before, there was a few other photographers lurking about but none of us got anything worth while as the conditions just didn’t play ball and the mountain spent the whole time covered in a lingering cloud that refused to budge and the sky refused to do anything interesting, you can’t win them all.

So I returned there early the next morning, no one else was there (yet, one guy form the night before turned up a little later). I clambered up onto a little hill, framed my composition and sat there for an hour clicking away as cars sped by and the light slowly changed.

The final image is a composition of several different exposures, the camera never moved, but the light sure did change over time. There were three seperate light trails blended together. The foreground and background are two seperate exposures (focus stacking) The sky is it’s own exposure and some of the warm highlights hitting the mountains were blended in from another exposure.

The end result? Worth it :)