Rising Sun and Setting Moon of Dolly Sods
There’s a story behind every photo. I’ll never look at this photo without remembering the absolute misery I endured to capture it. Dolly Sods, West Virginia is a place like no other. The wild blueberry and huckleberry bushes turn fiery red in the fall. I really wanted to capture the location in a special way. The difficulty of creating a panorama with the setting moon and rising sun would be enough but doing it with a sprained ankle in frigid temperatures and blasting winds really made for an interesting time.
I’m not even sure how I hurt my ankle, but it took me around 45 minutes to limp out to this location (which was less than half a mile from my truck). I made the hike several times searching for the right composition. I actually went through the photographing process twice. Once on Sunday morning and again Sunday evening. Both were in relatively the same location. This image is facing north, and the other is facing south. All these trips really had my ankle throbbing.
I cut my trip a day short because I was almost positive my ankle was broken. By Monday morning every step was excruciating. I left feeling defeated. I had such big plans, but I was almost sure the photos that I had taken wouldn’t work for the panorama.
It took a lot of time, some trial and error, but to my surprise the photos stitched together. Piecing this behemoth of an image together was tough. I won’t go into all the boring details, but it crashed my software multiple times. The full image is actually 48 photos taken over a 30 minute period on October 9th. There’s 16 photos across in 3 rows. The final image is 1.2 gig. It’s 20,000x10,000 pixels. The largest a photo can be on social media is 2048x2048. So this was about 50 times that and is drastically downsized on here.
Available Print Sizes
Metal Print with wooden wall mount (see Metal Prints tab for examples)
10x20-$120
20x40-$382
+6% WV sales tax
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