Assignment 2 Haleakala Morning

I just returned to Alaska from 2 weeks on Maui and took 1000's of pictures. Many of them are of whales I took with my camera in continuous shooting mode, but even subtracting them I still took 1000's. Much thanks to my very patient husband for letting me take as many photos as my batteries and memory cards would allow! He also did everything in his power to get my computer fixed when I damaged my power jack by kicking the cord. Even after what we hoped was a quick fix he patiently endured my not so silent frustration and tears as my computer then started shooting sparks (the ultimate reason my assignment is late) and I inadvertently erased from my memory card the best pictures I have ever taken of a sunset.....before I had saved them to my hard drive.  This is the first of the four photos I'm submitting. There were 11 finalist that the four were selected from. I will follow this post with the semi-finalists.

This photo, Haleakala Morning, was taken early in the morning. My husband and I left our room at 3:30 am in the hopes of witnessing one of the spectacular sunrises that our seen from the summit of this volcano. Unfortunately, there were too many clouds to see the sunrise. The first choices I had to make concerning this, and all the photos I would take had to do with which lens to use. It was bitterly cold and windy and we were hiking a short distance at over 10,000 feet so I was only bringing my camera - no bag, no tripod. I choose my smallest lens, the 18-55 mm kit lens that came with my camera (I so want a good wide angle lens, but figure if I can't take a descent photo with the kit lenses, having better ones won't make that much difference.)  I chose this over my telephoto lens thinking that I could always crop my images if I wanted to, but whatever is out of the field of view in the telephoto is lost forever. The other reason I chose this lens is that I would be hand holding the camera and I have notoriously shaky hands; the telephoto is heavier and requires an even steadier hand, especially given that I would have to use even slower shutter speeds with it. The fact that this photo is in focus when I hand held the camera and used this shutter speed is a miracle. I chose to shoot with the aperture wide open to be able to use as fast a shutter speed as possible. This worked also to capture the foreground in focus. I chose this photo over others that don't include the foreground because I think foreground adds to the sense of depth the photo has. I had to punch everything up a bit  in Lightroom  because there is a lot of haze in the original image. It has not been cropped.