Canal Feeder Dawn, Chasewater

A toss up.  The pre dawn conditions made it difficult to decide whether we would get a sunrise.  Dark cloud to the south, clear sky north.  The margin was just about where the sun would rise.

I decided it was worth a venture out and went up to Chasewater.  I'll leave you to decide if I made the right decision.  During an hour of walking around it went to an almost clear sky and back to cloudy.  Fortunately the pivotal moment allowed the sun to break through and just a bit of mist helped as well.  

Technical:  Couldn't control the light in this image even with 5 stops of graduated ND filtration so I bracketed and used Lightroom's photo merge to do the hard work.  Unfortunately, HDRs never quite look natural, perhaps it is the brain's understanding of scenes that gives it away.  I still had to use tone controls to bring up the shadow detail and control the highlights.