Title: Cho Oyu Reflected In Dudh Pokhari (Gokyo Lake)
Location: Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India, Asia (27°57’12” N 86°41’36” E)
Description: Early mornings when the sun is shining in the Himalayas can’t be beat. Sure, it’s cold (note the frozen lake water around the rocks) and early, but the views are spectacular.
This shot was taken from just below our lodge. One member of our photo tour was lucky enough to have a window view of Cho Oyu and decided to take his photos from the comfort of his bed. A few others and I wandered down to the lake waters to try to grab reflections in the still, slightly frozen waters.
Gokyo is a small outpost on a trade route from Nepal to Tibet, with the main pass over the mountains resting off the left side of the towering peak you see here. Powered by only solar energy and yak dung (there is no wood for miles in any direction) the town is still active in the winter months, which were quickly approaching as we left.
The image is a composite of three images shot at different shutter speeds, all with the same aperture, white balance and ISO. It was shot handheld and then combined in Adobe Lightroom with HDRsoft’s 32-bit Merge To TIFF plugin, then natively adjusted in Lightroom. I did some color correction in the foreground to warm it up and I also removed a photographer in a red jacket as well as the top of a blue tent to make the photo for aesthetically pleasing in my eyes.
To honor the removed photographer, I left his black tripod in the image. See if you can spot it by click on the image to zoom in.
Click on photo for a larger version. As this is a composite, the number shown below are an averaging of the shutter speeds used as they were the only variable to change between images.
| Camera | Canon 7D |
| Lens | Canon EF 10-22mm |
| ISO | 100 |
| Focal Length | 22mm |
| Aperture | f/6.3 |
| Shutter Speed | 1/200 |
| Altitude | 15,825.6 ft |
Photograph Copyright Peter West Carey. Image Available For Commercial Licensing (email).
Image may be reproduced for personal, non-commercial use (details) under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Non-Licensed Commercial use is prohibited without consent and attribution to this post must be given, please.