Sometimes, when I’m out at Lake Oahe in central South Dakota, I don’t go sailing. On this particular morning, I woke up well before sunrise and at first light saw that there were some clouds off in the east that looked promising. So I packed up my camera gear and went driving. I ended up on the bluffs above the Little Bend area – an area I have been to many times before.

It may seem obvious but a sunrise photo isn’t about the sun – that looks pretty much the same every time. It’s about the clouds, the terrain and the atmosphere. And in all of these cases, I got what I was looking for.

This photo, incidentally, is an HDR photo, which means that it’s really two or three photos sandwiched together into one. I experimented with a process that gives this photo a bit of a surreal look. Compositionally, this photo does what a landscape photo should do: there is something in the foreground, the middle ground and in the back ground.

I wish you could have been with me when I took this photo. It was an amazing moment in an very special place.

Canon 5DIII f/8.0 1/250 ISO400 19mm