Going to Montana's Glacier National Park from my North Carolina home was meant to be a photo-safari for me, with my wife along as a gear porter on the strenuous hikes to unique and fabulous vantage points. But, as fate would have it, it ended up being a family vacation with a rented SUV full or 5 people, ranging in age from 8 to a mobility-impaired 75. So much for the strenuous hikes. So much for the unique vantage points.
Instead, I drove the beautiful Going To The Sun road as storm clouds threatened, stopping at every vista point, quickly digging out my Nikon D800 with one lens or another, setting up my Vanguard tripod and rushing to capture what I could before the impatient passengers complained.
I knew I had my shot when I got to this scenic overlook just as the gathering storm clouds and rays of sun were sharing the sky and painting the landscape below, where a river wrapped around a peak like a white ribbon. I used Nikon's 24-70 f2.8 lens at 24mm, f20 and ISO 160 to shoot a couple of HDR images which I stitched together after the HDR processing in Photoshop CS5 to get this result (Viveza 2 also came into play). (The original file made a 5 foot wide print at 300 dpi for incredible detail.)
Glacier did not disappoint.