Sunrise, Balanced Rock

Wow! I love it.

Stunning image of a well known icon. It seems you have managed to come up with an image that is quite different from the well known views of this rock. Thanks for sharing.

Dinesh and Robert,

Thanks for the kind comments. I had first seen a photo of the sun rising behind Balanced rock in the National Park brochure, but it looked like it was taken with a 35mm? telephoto or just a heavily cropped image (just the top of the rock and the sun). I had driven through the Park for days and tried to figure out where the sun would rise behind Balanced rock and made my determination of an approximate composition that I wanted to use. The morning that I took this image I had to work quickly trying to get the location and set-up in the dim pre-dawn (dark) conditions. The longest lens that I had and had with me at the time for my Linhof Technikardan 45S was my Rodenstock f9.0 360mm Apo Ronar (the following year I had my Nikon 500mm/720mm ED T lens). I had basically run out of time to capture the image. I set up the camera and was only able to get the composition that I wanted in the vertical orientation, but I knew that I would have to crop out about 2/3 of the transparency to get the desired effect. So what you see here is the image as seen across the short axis of the 4X5 transparency with almost the lower 2/3 cropped (it was all silhoutte and very dense).

Rich