Flash Dance, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Briefly noted: The cloud above El Capitan was lit with the last light of the setting sun, but the winter trees below were stark, dark, and cold.

This is a composite of ten exposures ranging in exposure time from 1/10 of a second to 1/200 of a second. All the exposures were made at f/11 and ISO 100, using my Nikon D300, the 18-200mm VR Zoom lens at 18mm (27mm in 35mm terms) and a circular polarizer, with the camera mounted on a tripod.

I combined the ten exposures into a single HDR image using Photomatix, tone mapped the result, and tweaked it a bit in Photoshop (here are the details of how I’ve been post-processing these images shot for HDR).