The cliched Cooks Meadow (I think) shot of the Upper Yosemite Falls. An early morning shot. As I had mentioned on my twitter, the good thing about a tight-fitting mummy sleeping bag is that it wakes you up every hour if you're a sprawling sleeper (like I am), so when you invariably wake up at 4-5am you can just get up and get sunrise shots such as this.

This is my first semi-successful attempt at luminance mask exposure blending (think a fine controlled manual HDR). It's really difficult in areas that are high contrast and fine detail. There isn't TOOOO much of that in this picture so I was able to do at least an ok job. You can still spot the areas I had trouble. Not a job that's up to the standards I strive for, but the closest I've come yet, and hopefully a stepping stone to that standard.

Just had an idea of doing an actual standard HDR, matching the brightness and darks of my manualled picture, and masking in the areas where there's high contrast and fine detail, thus taking out the difficult manual part and maintaining the high precision manual exposure blending everywhere else. I will have to give that a try on my next image.