Long Lake sunrise in Little Lakes Valley, CA in the Sierra mountains by Mammoth Lakes, CA.

I finally have the skill to edit this photo! OMG yay XD This photo has tormented me for SOOOOOOO long. It's actually an HDR and I had such a hard time finding a way to manually blend the exposures with all those tiny patches of high contrast densely packed together.

The problem is I was using luminance masks to do it, but when you do that, the contrast drops and everything gets a muddy grey. You can hand mask these areas, but it is REALLY difficult to do where there are boundaries of high contrast...which is like half this picture. Worse still is the high contrast is in tiny, packed groups. I would have had to hand mask each little island of high contrast...no freaking way. Note that this wouldn't have been a problem if I had exposed well enough on each of the 3 exposures (they were spread too far appart), or if I had taken more exposers to cover the exposure gamut.

I finally figured out a trick with masks that allows you feather the luminance mask, which both increases the contrast slightly and kills the grey when used correctly. Unfortunately, the highlights are still more blown out than I'd like, but that mistake was at the time of taking the photo and I know exactly what I did wrong. Next time I'll do a lot better...compositionally as well. This one is lacking.

I've learned a LOOOOT in the last few days. Think I've learned enough to be able to reach a new level. Just need an opportunity to take more good pictures.