Monday, April 13, 2026
Good morning to you. Well, you might be reading this in the afternoon, in which case, good afternoon. I suppose you could also be reading this at night which would make it good evening. Shall we forget the specifics of the greeting and let’s just say, I woke up early this morning and went to the Blue Ridge Parkway for a bit of a sunrise trek. I honestly wasn’t sure that it was going to happen because the weather for the most part has been just too clear for much interest in the sky here lately. When I went to sleep, things were looking promising for a sunrise with some decent color forecast. However, that was all going to be dependent on whether or not the clouds arrived when they were forecast to. If they were late, there would be nothing in the sky to catch the color, and if they were early, there would be a good chance that they would block the sun at the horizon and spoil any chance of color. I’ve gambled with this situation before and have a fair track record with guessing it all right. It would all come down to what things looked like when the alarm rang in the morning.
That happened at 4:30am and I was far from ready for it to ring. It had been a rough night and there had not been much sleep considering Toni and I turned in early. With one eye still closed, I looked at the weather and found that the skies were clear at the moment and the clouds that were supposed to come in were still scheduled for right at sunrise, only the coverage wasn’t nearly as much as I had been hoping for according to one app. The other one still had good coverage right at sunrise with the clouds being at high and mid altitudes. This was a good indicator for color. I checked the sunrise forecaster just to break the tie, and it was showing decent color still. I considered my options for roughly 20 minutes before deciding if I didn’t get up Toni would be sending me a picture of an awesome sunrise that I would regret not photographing. I already had the spot picked out and I knew the composition that I was going to go for. The hard work had been done; I just needed to get there.
With that in mind, I rolled out of bed and got dressed. After breakfast, I was in the truck and heading West just before 5:30. I was thinking about how I was going to shoot the scene because it was one that I had done several times before at the Thunder Hill Overlook. Yeah, it isn’t an exotic location by any stretch, but the view that I was after wasn’t the actual overlook. I was looking to work with the fence that was across the road. There is a section that has a support post diagonally leaning against the fence. It makes for a fantastic foreground that leads to the mountain in the distance. The road itself snakes through the scene and the sunrise can be observed to the right of the road. Yeah, I knew this composition pretty well, but I was planning on using my 14mm prime lens to go along with my desire to become more proficient in seeing the world in a wide-angle fashion. Usually, I will use either my 24-70mm lens or my 16-35mm which both work well and allow me to use filters. I wasn’t thinking that I would need any filters this morning which would make the bug eyed 14mm lens suitable to work with.
Shortly after I got on the Parkway, I was surprised to see that there was a section that was closed for some kind of construction. I had not planned for this and didn’t know where it was closed down. I just decided to go with the flow and follow the detours. I had to exit the Parkway at Old 421 and go through some back roads until I found that I was on Bamboo Rd. I knew this access point and that was in a good spot to be able to continue on to Thunder Hill. The detour didn’t cost me much more than a few minutes, so there was no problem there. A few more miles down the road I arrived at the overlook and found no less than six other vehicles parked in the overlook parking area. I wasn’t expecting that many other cars and usually for sunrise, there are only a couple of others there. The sky was already starting to show color, so I guess I understood why they were there. It didn’t really matter because I wasn’t going to be using the overlook at all since my shot was across the street where I saw nobody at all.
I grabbed my gear and crossed the road to get up on the embankment where I wanted to be. I walked the fenceline until I found the one diagonal post that I wanted. Things were looking fine, except for one tree that had grown quite a bit since my last visit here. That tree had been a problem before, but I had been able to compose the photo in a way that minimized the impact it had on the right side of the frame. It was large enough now that I wasn’t quite seeing that happening this time, especially since the color was most dominant near the horizon beyond that tree. It effectively blocked my view and left me with not much else other than a composition without a clear subject.
I had to think quickly because the sky was really starting to pop off and I didn’t want to miss out on the color looking for a composition. I kept walking the fenceline to see if there was another option, even though I knew that there wasn’t. At least not using the fence as a leading line. Back on the other side of the road, I found a nice view of the color but knew that the compositions there were not all that easy to come by since there was a line of trees that would be between me and the view. It was my best shot though, so I continued my walk towards that vantage point to see how things were lining up. With the darkness on the foreground, I started to think that I could work that to my advantage and minimize the trees which were still pretty much bare. I had great color, but I needed to find a composition. I needed to find that composition right now as a matter of fact.
Taking the scene into account and trying to figure out what I liked about it; I found that it was that area at the horizon that I liked best. The color wasn’t stretching too far into the sky, and I did like the rolling mountains below the horizon, but if I strayed too low, I would end up getting portions of the foreground that I didn’t want to see in the photo. The first thought that came to mind was doing a panorama of the scene which is a great tool for capturing a small area above and below the horizon when the emphasis in on the width of the scene. I guess in a way, I was looking at this through my wide-angle glasses after all. There would be no wide lens, and certainly not the 14mm that I had planned on. My composition was not even remotely related to what I had planned. Everything had been thrown out the window, and I was left rolling with the punches.
I found a good spot for the tripod and got it leveled out before adding the camera and doing some dry runs through the scene to check for exposure issues. Once that was done, I ended up doing four different series of images from left to right with slightly different focal lengths to get me closest to the composition that I was after. I knew that I was wanting a 1:3 aspect ratio which is kind of hard to visualize across ten or so frames. I also had to account for cropping the image which could take a good bit off of the top and bottom depending on the rendering of the images through Lightroom. I was liking how things were looking and started to find a spot that I really liked within the composition which I wanted to spend a bit more time with.
In order to get that section captured, I had to move further down the road to clear the trees. This took the brightest part of the sky out of the view which I hadn’t wanted to do originally. Now that the sun was getting closer to the horizon, that part of the sky was too bright and I liked the tones better from this angle anyway. I used the telephoto lens that was already on the camera along with the grad filter that I had added to allow a bit more exposure on the rolling hills and put together a composition that I liked as a single frame capture. It was a pretty straightforward shot and one that I think I had done before under a cloudy sky with no real color to it.
It was while I was putting this composition together that the sky really lit up. The color was no longer just at the horizon, but it was stretching well above the horizon and filled about the same space in the frame as the rolling hills in the midground. I liked how this was looking and decided that with the brilliant colors in the frame, I needed to find a new balance with the composition that I was shooting. While I had been centered more on the rolling hills with just a third of the frame for the color, I increased the scope a bit and centered horizon which calmed the image. This offset the drama that the oranges and reds were causing in the sky while bringing more of those colors into the frame. The hills were all still in shadow and were very blue in tone which provided another form of color balance to the scene as well.
I really liked these single frame exposures and one of the last ones that I shot became the keeper of the series. I liked the view and I loved the colors. In fact, I liked this angle better than what I had started out shooting with the panoramas. The color was starting to fade with the sun right at the horizon, but I decided that I would attempt one more panorama before shifting my attention. I leveled the tripod and oriented the camera vertically again before doing a dry run through the series to see how the exposure was looking. After I set the focus, I started shooting for real as the light was fading.
I ended up capturing two more series of images for a panorama which brought the total frames captured for the morning to 69. Out of a total of five attempts, it was the very last one that turned into the keeper. As with most of the panos that I had shot, this one was a total of ten frames from left to right. It was shot with a grad filter to keep some exposure on the ground while saturating the colors in the sky. I cropped this one a bit closer than the others which worked out very well because I had leveled the tripod nearly perfect, allowing for all the frames to line up nicely. There were just a few vacant pixels after the stitching which I had Lightroom fill in before I cropped the image into the final aspect ratio. I actually didn’t throw much of the image away doing this and I like to keep as many pixels as I can, especially when doing a panorama which will hopefully become a huge wall print at some point in the future.
The formula with this one was pretty much the same as the single frame capture that I had done earlier. I kept the horizon roughly centered because it felt right to do it that way. It visually calmed the image while giving equal time and attention to the sky as well as the landscape before me. Normally, I would want to choose which was more important and give more of the frame to that element, but in this case, they were both equally as important to the story. I was very fortunate that there were some breaks in the clouds which gave me that blue within the warmer tones to add to the validity of the colors. It is all too easy to fudge a sunrise sky, but in doing that, you will lose the natural blue sky color if there is any in the frame.
I really liked how this panorama came together and while it certainly wasn’t the composition that I had in mind for this morning, it did sum up what the sunrise felt like. In fact, both of the photos turned out very well and I had made the right decision to abandon my original thought in favor of chasing the color like I did. I remember leaving Thunder Hill thinking that if I had just gotten a single photo from the morning that it would have been worth getting up early and going out for it. I ended up getting two solid photos, so I’m really happy about that. With 69 frames shot, it would appear that my hit rate has suffered from my norm. However, we have to keep in mind that 62 of those frames amounted to only five images since they were panoramas which brings the real frame count to just 12 and of those, I am keeping two. That is in line with a pretty good day, especially for a sunrise with the lighting changing quickly as it does.
The real question was whether or not I was finished with the day. There were still two other locations that I wanted to shoot if the clouds cooperated. One was an old Chevy parked next to a Jeep of some sort, and the other was a Volvo that I had spotted again in the area of Clingman. Would the sky work for either of those subjects, would I be able to get them both? I guess you will have to stick around to find out. I’ll have your answer tomorrow morning.
Until then….
